Bringing Dry Data to Life – Sonification

The camera pans over the hospital ward. It’s night, and only the light from the occasional cars turning into the parking lot outside sweeps across the walls. The patient lies motionless in bed. On a heart monitor, the sharp waves move across the screen in time with the beeping: “beep… beep… beep… beep…” Suddenly, the frequency increases: “beep… beep… beep… beep, beep, beep, beep…” Staff rush in, the lights turn on, more machines are connected. But… the line on the monitor is straight. The only sound heard is “piiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii…” 

The scene is almost cliché, but it’s impossible to defend against it. The escalating frequency in those simple sound signals, while there’s still hope, makes adrenaline pump in our brains, and the prolonged, monotonous tone empties us of hope and fills our chests with an echoing void.

The extremely primitive sounds: “beep… beep… beep… beep…” and “piiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii…” fill us with a universe of emotions. We cannot shield ourselves or intellectualize them away; our bodies sense them and react by showering us with internal chemistry and initiating processes that have been honed over hundreds of thousands of years.

The beeping from the heart monitor is part of a technology called sonification, which can be compared to visualization. While graphs, images, and symbols visualize, it is sound that is used to represent data in sonification. And we encounter it all around us in our everyday lives: when we get into the car, a sound reminds us to buckle up, and another helps us back up safely. Our phones beep when we receive a message and chime when we send an email. The GPS guides us with a voice so we can keep our eyes on the road, and the smoke alarm emits one sound when the battery needs replacing and another when there’s a fire. Patterns from small movements in the bedrock translates into sound that seismographs can more easily analyze changes and possible treats. 

Sound touches us directly and without many filters, making it extremely effective for alarming and warning. But even positive sounds are powerful. Sound is used in therapeutic contexts in many different ways, as it is known to have a direct ability to affect the brain, our emotions, and even the body’s physical state. Whether it’s about improving mental health, promoting relaxation, alleviating pain, or enhancing sleep, sound is a powerful tool in therapies worldwide. And who doesn’t have a favorite song filled with memories and emotions? A song we turn to when we need it.

Loud Numbers

In the podcast Loud Numbers, Duncan Geere and Miriam Quick explore how sonification can be used to create sound artworks based on existing or collected data.

– For some time I’d been hoping to find a podcast that used sonification to do data storytelling in audio, but I never found one. So when I met Miriam at a conference, I asked if she’d be interested in the idea. 

And she was. Duncan comes from journalism but has always played music and DJed, while Miriam has a PhD in Music, so they shared a perspective and approach to sonification as a tool “to bring dry data to life,” as Duncan puts it.

– We knew from the start that we wanted to make one season, with a limited number of episodes, rather than something that was ongoing. So we produced them in 2020 and 2021 and released them in mid-2021. Each episode tells a data story, explains how we converted it to sound, and then presents an original piece of music made from those sounds.

Loud Numbers is thus not just a podcast series about sonification but a series of sound artworks that depict and address various phenomena where data is available: wildfires, the U.S. economy, polar climates… But also how our senses interact in a sound piece based on beer tasting.

Listeners also gain insight into how the artworks were created and how sound was used. Miriam and Duncan have a penchant for adding an extra element of “genre” to their works. For example, the piece about the U.S. economy is based on drum 'n' bass, the piece about the polar climate features “ice-cold Scandinavian techno,” and European bureaucracy takes the form of a classical fugue. 

Sonification

Sound has long been used in art alongside what we define as music in everyday language. The Futurists of the early 20th century were keen to incorporate the new industrialized and mechanized society into their art, and noise and mechanical sounds were part of that. They created instruments that imitated these sounds, and in their desire to establish things, the Italian Futurists created a manifesto, “L'arte dei rumori,” which defined what “noise art” would be. At this time, the term “sonification” was not yet in use, nor was it when the modernist pioneer of sound art, John Cage, created his works in the mid-20th century. 

The concept first emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, initially in scientific circles, but art quickly incorporated it into the project. It was Gregory Kramer, a pioneer in sonification, who popularized it in broader circles. In 1992, he organized the first **International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD)**, where researchers, technicians, and artists gathered to explore how sound could be used to represent data. Art, technology, and science are at the core of artistic sonification.

From Podcast to Design Studio

Today, Loud Numbers is a design studio that works on both commercial and artistic commissions.

– Early on, we started taking on assignments from others. We’d begun building the skills, we had a portfolio, and we found that there was an audience for it. Without those three things, we couldn’t have turned the podcast series into a studio. 

In their newest work, “On Standby”, Duncan and Miriam are working with data they have collected themselves. Using so-called “smart plugs,” they gathered data on nightly electricity consumption from a number of volunteers, and this data is now to be translated into an eleven-hour long sound piece — intended to be listened to while sleeping or by night workers during a shift.

– It’s a calming and ambient musical piece which encourages reflection and contemplation, rather than shouting out a message. We’ve included several spoken-word segments where our data collectors reflect on their own habits and behaviours around how they consume energy. It even includes a poem written by Anna Arvidsdotter. At the end of the night, as listeners wake up, the music fades into a symphony of birdsong.

On Standby is one of the works created in a test project where two municipalities in Latvia and Finland, along with Region Skåne in Sweden, collaborate with cultural promoters to find working methods and formats for how cultural life can be invited to address challenges such as energy consumption through artistic representation and collaborations with the surrounding community. The project is 80% funded by the EU’s Interreg Baltic Sea Region Programme and 20% by partners (you can read more about the project here: https://interreg-baltic.eu/project/cci4change/ ).

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One of the outcomes of the CCI4Change project will be a "toolbox" with tools to facilitate collaborations between artists, performers, and creatives, and public authorities or private foundations, in addressing energy reduction and other sustainability challenges. The project also explores the role of intermediaries in these contexts, how to ensure artistic freedom, regulate copyright, and ensure fair and transparent processes. Are you interested in accessing this toolbox? Contact: farhia@stpln.se

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Listen to all episodes of Loud Numbers: https://www.loudnumbers.net/podcast

Or get familiar with the Studio studion: https://www.loudnumbers.net/ 

Duncan and Miriam's tips on interesting sonification works. Own and others':
Scorched Earth (Loud Numbers, 2024) is an audiovisual sonification of forest fires in Skåne in 2018

Egypt Building Collapses (Tactical Technology Collective, 2014) is a sonification of sudden collapses of residential buildings in Egypt

Nine Rounds a Second (New York Times, 2017) uses sonification to explain how “bump stocks” allowed the gunman to fire faster during the mass shooting in Las Vegas

Bristol Burning (Loud Numbers, 2023) is a dub-influenced track, with vocals from hip-hop artist T. Relly, that represents air pollution levels in Bristol, UK.

The Carrington Event (Loud Numbers, 2024) is a live post-rock performance of data from the 1859 solar storm of the same name.

Anthropocene in C Major (Jamie Perera, 2020) is an orchestral/electronic performance of 12,000 years of climate data.