Sonifying Data

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Has anyone here done any data sonification? The thread on visualizing music data made me think about this.
gadgets an gizmos..make noise https://soundcloud.com/crystalawareness Restocked: 3/24
old stuff http://ww.dancingbearaudioresearch.com/
if this post is edited -it was for punctuation, grammar, or to make it coherent (or make me seem coherent).

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you mean like "databending"?

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it’s considered a subset of “databending” (according to the infallible wikipedia )🧐
Using data from other than musical sources to create songs, sounds, effects, etc.
Last edited by CrystalWizard on Tue Oct 23, 2018 10:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.
gadgets an gizmos..make noise https://soundcloud.com/crystalawareness Restocked: 3/24
old stuff http://ww.dancingbearaudioresearch.com/
if this post is edited -it was for punctuation, grammar, or to make it coherent (or make me seem coherent).

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CrystalWizard wrote: Tue Oct 23, 2018 10:26 pm Has anyone here done any data sonification? The thread on visualizing music data made me think about this.
lots - I set up a University course in data visualisation which included sonification over 10 years ago - the organisation you might investigate is ICAD

http://www.icad.org/

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CrystalWizard wrote: Tue Oct 23, 2018 10:39 pm 🧐
🧐

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woggle wrote: Tue Oct 23, 2018 10:40 pm
CrystalWizard wrote: Tue Oct 23, 2018 10:26 pm Has anyone here done any data sonification? The thread on visualizing music data made me think about this.
lots - I set up a University course in data visualisation which included sonification over 10 years ago - the organisation you might investigate is ICAD

http://www.icad.org/
Thanks, i’ll check it out.
gadgets an gizmos..make noise https://soundcloud.com/crystalawareness Restocked: 3/24
old stuff http://ww.dancingbearaudioresearch.com/
if this post is edited -it was for punctuation, grammar, or to make it coherent (or make me seem coherent).

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Seismograph recordings played back at audio rate sound fantastic. This might not exactly qualify as "sonification," since seismic waves are basically sound waves to begin with, but they're surprisingly rich and varied. Lots of textures from the noise of the environment, crackles and pops from small earthquakes, and of course big booms from larger quakes. Here's a recording from one station in California. No big earthquakes in this one, just two days worth of ambient noises, recorded at 100 Hz, played back at 44,100. It's near a couple of highways and a small airport, so most of the sounds are from passing vehicles and (I think) a couple of prop planes landing and taking off again.

(bah, forgot dropbox links don't play; open it in a new window, or save the file I guess)

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The main distinction is between sonification and audification. Audification is where you get some data and turn it into sound without any transformation of the data relations eg take human EEG and pitch it up into audible range, take planetary motion and pitch it up. Audification is pretty trivial and the results are rarely of much interest. Sonification includes things like modeling the dynamics of human EEG and sonifying that in such a way the dynamics are revealed

[to sonify cthonophonic's example I would probably do something like remove the trend and express the data as deviations from trend, maybe take the derivative and sonify that - first though I would try and understand what the interest was or could be in the data and then transform the data to express that more obviously]

An area where simple representation of the data works is often in sculptural form eg http://teemingvoid.blogspot.com/2010/06 ... g-cup.html
Last edited by woggle on Tue Oct 23, 2018 11:23 pm, edited 3 times in total.

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Oh, and this one is fun too. It's from a very low frequency recording (~1Hz I think), with all the high frequency noise filtered out so the only signal left is from the tidal acceleration of the moon. It covers a 90 day period, pitched way up, so that it plays back as a low C (and loops pretty well, if you want to play the moon as bass instrument!).

I only have a few files on hand right now; I'll post some quakes later too if people are interested. DIY types can grab seismic data from thousands of different stations using the IRIS web API.

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