C74 Ginger

The question started out harmless enough. “Hey Ginger, do you want to pick an interesting Max project to talk about?”

And so, I shopped around the Cycling ‘74 Projects library, the same way I walk around the drug store late at night wearing my mom jeans and old Birkenstocks.

Junction: Taxi Cabs Generate A Soundtrack in Real Time

"Through the use of publicly available live footage from New York’s Traffic Management Center, Junction tracks the movements of taxis in some of the city’s busiest intersections. It uses their position, velocity and overall density to synthesize sounds."

I had chosen a similar project based on “hearing information” for my section in the 1000 Max Projects Staff Picks, and to my surprise, they were both from the same person, Micah Frank. 

A large reason for my interest here lies in the basic ideas of sonification. I think it’s a big deal. Like, sliced bread big deal.

In other words, why just let the visual people have all the fun?

If you think about all this data that we encounter on a daily basis, a vast majority of it is visual. Graphs, drawings, charts, infographics with those icons you see on bathroom signs; these are all visualizations of data to show us how the economy is doing or who is leading in the polls or how much weight one of those Kardashians gained in the past two years. Whatever.

We’ve essentially ingested this type of data using our eyes. Mostly two-dimensional compositions using tabs, circles, whirlygigs and, okay, JavaScript. While our interactions with this data may have advanced to the point of seeing things happen in real time or being able to manipulate it like on Minority Report, the output still generally remains unchanged.

Because in the age of new technologies and unstoppable curiosity, projects like Junction introduce very inclusive opportunities for very practical applications.

The presentation of data is an artform in itself. The practice exists to inform and engage, and this is what we rely on to make decisions, big and small. It is a basis for us understanding something, and if we don’t get a good enough picture, if this data is not presented well enough, it is the difference between buying the right zit cream, to countries declaring war against each other.

Just like the talking pictures changed the way we all saw movies and film, can the same thing not be applied to situations where Gene Kelly is not wearing a bouffant?

Or in this case, sound giving us the opportunity to experience infinitesimally small objects, with Lily Asquith from CERN, speaking at TEDxZurich:

One of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite movies, Singin' in the Rain.

Why You Rattlesnake You...

Sonification is the process of creating sounds that carry information. Musical compositions carry information in the sense that they often describe a place, a time or a feeling; the associations we make between sonic properties such as pitch and physical properties such as speed or size, come to us without effort. The grand aim of the LHCsound project is to 'dorkify' the process of encoding information in sound. The attempts to capture the behaviour of the recently discovered Higgs boson in sounds are presented for your wonder and bafflement.

Lily Asquith is a High Energy Particle Physics research scholar working on the ATLAS experiment at CERN. Lily completed her PhD in 2009 at University College London, on the search for a Higgs boson in association with a pair of top quarks using the ATLAS detector. Since 2010 Lily has been a member of the ATLAS High Energy Physics group at Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, where her work has been focussed on the study of jet physics: the observable sprays of particles governed by Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). She has been actively involved in science communication since her student days, establishing the LHCsound project to facilitate maximum appreciate of the experiments ongoing at the LHC, and writing for the Guardian science blog 'Life and Physics'. Currently Lily is based at CERN in Geneva, where she is co-leading the group of physicists investigating the use of novel techniques to use the substructure of hadronic jets in searches for new physics and in precision measurements of the properties of the newly discovered Higgs boson.

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)

Listening to data from the Large Hadron Collider | Lily Asquith |TEDxZurich

the-sonification-of-data

The Sonification of Data

Rnul interactive

The whole system is build in Max, five computers are connected with each other and are controlled through OSC. All the elements of the systems are divided in five different patches like the database of more than one hundred items, the projection mapping on the model, three touchscreens and the synchronization of the video's, 

Search Results