1. On Sonification
"Sonification [is the] use of nonspeech audio to convey information; more specifically sonification is the transformation of data relations into perceived relations in an acoustic signal for the purposes of facilitating communication or interpretation."
International Community for Auditory Display, in: Schoon / Volmar 2012, p. 12.
Graphics are for the eyes 👀, Sonification is for the ears 👂
2. Why to use sonification
1. To take listeners on a journey
The ear hears things the eye can't see. Sonification creates a completely new experience for your audience, revealing patterns that charts and graphs might miss.
2. To raise awareness
Words can't express everything, but sound hits you right in the feels. Turn climate data into something people actually feel, not just another chart they scroll past.
3. To gain attention
An unexpected sound stops people in their tracks. Whether it's harsh inequality data or a haunting extinction melody – audio cuts through noise and grabs attention.
4. To tell a story differently
Asking "what would this sound like?" makes you really think about what your data means. This fresh perspective often reveals stories you never noticed before.
5. To have fun
Sometimes the best reason is just joy. Data doesn't always have to be serious – it can groove, surprise, and make people smile. That's perfectly valid science too.
3. Examples
Instagram Reels:
@sonifriday is our Instagram account, in which we've shared lots of short reels about different topics, including speaking times of men and women in the German parliament, the Ahrtal flood of 2021, a natural disaster, as well as birds dying from window collisions.
Podcast episodes:
Connection lost: An ARD podcast about how much the coronavirus pandemic has divided us as a society includes the changing numbers of visitors in „places like restaurants, cafes, shopping centers, theme parks, museums, libraries, and movie theaters“ as a sonification. (in German)
Boiling sea: The daily podcast by Süddeutsche Zeitung featured a sonification on rising ocean temperatures. (in German)
Loud Numbers Podcast: In each episode of the Loud Numbers podcast, they introduce a data story, explain how they sonified it, and then play the music track they created. (in English)
4. Tools
There's plenty of tools to create data sonifications, we'll focus on DataSonifyer and Sonic Pi.
4.1 DataSonifyer - 5 Steps to your Sonification
DataSonifyer is a web tool to transform data into sound without having to write code. Get started on the website.
- 1. Prepare Data: You need a dataset (e.g. climate data) as CSV-file with at least one column of numerical data with one value per row (e.g. temperature anomaly per year).
- 2. Load Data: Open studio.datasonifyer.de/en and click on "Load Data", select your CSV-file and click "open". In the pop-up, insert the delimiter of the file (mostly a comma: ",")
- 3. Choose Mapping: Which musical parameter do you want to control with your data? Pitch or Frequency? Amplitude? Or Envelope? The corresponding sound-modules are below the green canvas or can be loaded with a click on "Add Sound Module"
- 4. Sonify Data: Let's use the Frequency-Module. Choose the data in the "Data"-Select (e.g. temperature anomaly). You then can specify the lowest and highest note of the sonification by adding values into "Min Freq" and "Max Freq" in Hertz (hearable range goes from 20 to 20000).
- 5. Finetuning and Mixing: If you want to use a musical scale, choose one from "Scalemode". Then, define the minimum and the maximum octave in the corresponding boxes (e.g. Min: 2, Max: 5). If you want to add another set of data, e.g. Amplitude, just use the Amplitude-Module in the same way as the Frequency-Module.
4.2 Sonic Pi - Additional possibilites for your sonification
Sonic Pi is a live coding tool that can be used for sonifications. Download it on the website to get started. There's a tutorial by Sam Aaron, the creator of Sonic Pi.
Live loops are very valuable for data sonifications. It's easy to create your first one!
🎵 Try this:
notes = [48, 52, 55, 59, 60, 59, 55, 52]
live_loop :melody do
tick
note = notes.look
puts note
synth :dsaw, note: note, attack: 0.02, release: 0.2, amp: 0.5
sleep 0.25
end
Sampling offers lots of opportunities in sonification as well as music production.
🎵 Try this:
live_loop :drum_beat do
sample :bd_tek, amp: 0.8
sleep 0.5
sample :sn_dub, amp: 0.6
sleep 0.5
sample :bd_tek, amp: 0.8
sleep 0.25
sample :bd_tek, amp: 0.5 if one_in(3)
sleep 0.25
sample :sn_dub, amp: 0.7
sleep 0.5
end
Consider supporting Sam Aaron, the creator of Sonic Pi, financially.