I’ve finally managed to shift thought into action, delving into the world of sonification for the last few days or so. Sonifcation Tools, “a collection of unique creative devices designed by Ableton Certified Trainer Noah Pred to allow access to new musical ideas via real-world data sets,” has allowed me to breathe life into these thoughts. Finding, let alone understanding, applicable data sets has proved to be a lot more difficult then I first imagined. Complex language and obscure abbreviations have made it hard to extrapolate the supposed correct meaning from most I’ve come across; But after long enough I managed to find some that were comprehensible, using ‘Forest Area As Share Of Land Area’ data, taken from the online open access data platform ‘Our World In Data’, as material to sonify with. On their website, the data is represented as an animated graph, with the X-axis representing years and Y-axis representing share of land covered by forest. Downloading an excel sheet of the data embedded into this graph allowed me to copy and paste specific parts of it into Pred’s sonification device, with which I set pentatonic and dorian scales as compositional parameters. The resulting soundscape composition can be heard below. I have also left a description underneath the track to demystify my methodology.
Taking an endangered bird from each of the top 10 countries for global tree cover loss between 2001 and 2023 (World Resources Institute), I used the data sets from their respective countries as triggers.
The interweaving of these pitched birdsongs create an imagined woodland soundscape, derived from forest area data. Refer to the links below for more details on the trends of deforestation and afforestation.
Top 10 countries for global tree cover loss, 2001-2023 + Respective Endangered Bird:
1. Russia – Spoon Billed Sandpiper
2. Brazil – Great Billed Seed Finch
3. Canada – Northern Spotted Owl
4. USA – White Throated Sparrow
5. Indonesia – Sumatran Laughing Thrush
6. Congo – Green Broadbill
7. China – Yellow Breasted Bunting
8. Malaysia – Fluffy Backed Tit Babbler
9. Australia – Finch
10. Bolivia – Wattled Curassow
Higher Pitch = More Forest Cover
Lower Pitch = Lower Forest Cover
research.wri.org/gfr/top-ten-lists
ourworldindata.org/deforestation
ourworldindata.org/grapher/forest-…cotland~FRA~USA
Reflection
This was an interesting exercise that ultimately ending up being an enjoyable process once I had gathered all the material needed. On the art of sonification however, It is important to note that in a creative frenzy to sonify this data, I produced this mostly on the back of my personal aesthetic. As a result the work sounds beautiful to me, but I am aware that without the added description it is impossible (mostly) to gleam, purely from listening, what the data is telling us. In an attempt to retrace my steps, I reread the article from which I retrieved the inital data set from.
Sonification to evoke an emotional or visceral reaction
Made purely aesthetically to fit my own ideas of beauty … no other though than this
can data be gleamed from this …?
In a frenzy to realise my first sonification, I downloaded an excel sheet of the data embedded into this graph without paying too much attention to the contents of the article.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/forest-area-as-share-of-land-area?time=2020
What started off as a simple sonification of
Just manually type or simply copy and paste raw numeric data into the text entry field of all four devices to generate corresponding MIDI patterns with Data MIDI or Dataforge, modulation sequences with Data Mod, or spectral filtration, wavefolding distortion, impulse convolution and even exported audio waveforms with Data FX.
- Explain My Sonification experiment
- describe what it portrays and what you were going for
- compare it to marty quinn from book
- go deeper into sonification
- thinking about bio sonification
- Max for live devices … ?
the way we interface with the world is through our particular sense of beauty/ aesthetics..
Going back to our world in data and reading it thoroughly