Kasper Fangel Skov

sonic particles 2.0 is a real-time sonification of urban environmental data. It was created as part of the international data visualization challenge, Data Canvas: Sense Your City. 

Prior to the challenge a network of sensors were spread out in seven cities across three continents. The network of open data provided by the DIY environmental sensors empowered citizens with real-time information about their surroundings.

sonic particles 2.0 translates the abstract environmental data into sound providing an aesthetic musical representation of differentiating urban environments. Each city has it's own unique ever-changing composition. 

The DIY sensors were deployed in Spring 2015 by a community spread across 3 continents - in San Francisco, Bangalore, Boston, Geneva, Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai and Singapore. By selecting a city on the map you will hear the emerging composition.

(Sensors are not streaming anymore, but a version based on historical data is available).

sonic-particles-2-0-a-real-time-sonification-of-urban-environmental-data

sonic particles 2.0 - a real-time sonification of urban environmental data

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

oli larkin

Thijs Koerselman

Author: ICSRiM, University of LeedsThe i-Maestro 3D Augmented Mirror is a software tool built with Max and Jitter, designed to support bowed-string instrument training by using multimodal feedback. A realtime interface to a VICON 3D motion capture system allows the recording and display of bowing technique and posture in a 3D environment, and the extraction of a variety of pertinent features which can be monitored using visual or auditory displays. The 3D Augmented Mirror was developed as part of the i-Maestro EC-IST project at ICSRiM at the University of Leeds, UK.

project28-i-maestro-3d-augmented-mirror

i-Maestro 3D Augmented Mirror

owen lloyd

Building Materials is an installed composition, made in direct response to the architecture and use of Exeter Phoenix arts centre.Sensors spread throughout the building carry raw data back to a listening room to form a self generating audio composition, created in software designed by myself in Max/Msp. I am interested in allowing what goes on in particular architectural spaces to dictate the structure of the composition, be it through human activity, light levels, air flow or its functional, operating life.Sounds and data wind their way through the building and are expressed visually through coloured tape carrying wires along walls, floors and ceilings, reminiscent of the iconic London Underground map. This network is there to be explored, followed through the building, drawing attention to what often seem like very ordinary activities: the shutting of a door, the squeak of a floorboard, the whir of the air conditioning. I want the work to be underpinned by  such narratives, I like how working like this fills a piece of music with snippets of unforeseen stories through the opening of a window, the joining of a dance class, or meetings in a café.  These insignificant happenings are re-presented in the final composition, transformed, altered or rearranged, leaving only fragments of traceable sound.At once site specific and portable to other situations, Building Materials cedes much of the artist’s own authorial control. In any other building and at any other time audiences would experience a completely different work because its form is sensitive to, indeed largely determined by, its environment.

building-materials

Building Materials

Sammio2

MaxMSP is the driving force behind this project, right from jitter objects to download the twitter data, through to oscillators, controls, GUI, and an OpenSoundControl implementation. This experimental synthesiser wouldn't be here if it wasn't for MaxMSP.

twinthesis

Twinthesis

robermann

Max/MSP enabled the auralization of several sorting algorithm's execution path: every instruction triggers an oscillator, tuned to a specific pitch.

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Max/MSP and CodeSounding – How sorting algorithms sound

Grégoire Lorieux

Chemical Symphony is my contribution to the exhibition »Critical Zones«, Observatories for Earthly Politics in ZKM of Karlsruhe (Germany), on the impetus of the famous sociologist Bruno Latour.

I sonified the data of a device called RiverLab, in collaboration with a geophysicist, through 3 sequences depicting the river's physico-chemical fluctuations at different time scales. For ex., the sunshine is depicted by the thickness and color of an orchestral chord, as by DMX-controlled light; potassium variations by oboes...

Max was used throughout the process. The raw data was resampled, normalized and written in a mc soundfile (1 sample = 10 mn of data). gen~ allows to read the data accurately. River flow controls the reading speed; chemical variations are mapped to musical algorithms playing binaural-spatialized orchestral samples. The exhibition patch runs mc soundfiles with 8 mixdowned sonic layers, linked to curves' opacity; 2 data layers (DMX and cursor). 

 Chemical Symphony is my contribution to the exhibition »Critical Zones«, Observatories for Earthly Politics in ZKM of Karlsruhe (Germany), 

chemical-symphony-critical-zones

Chemical Symphony (Critical Zones)

playmodes

Forms is a real-time audiovisual synthesis exercise.

Driven by a set of rules for graphic generation based on randomness and probability, a custom software proposes a series of visual compositions created in realtime and never repeating.

These scores can be framed within the tradition of graphic musical notation that gained strength among twentieth-century composers and which allowed music to be released from tone, bars and the rigidity of classic staves.

Thanks to a real-time "sonification" engine written in MAX/MSP which reads (using the Syphon external) graphics created in realtime with Processing, images are transformed into sound using spectral synthesis algorithms. A header runs through the image from left to right, interpreting that small vertical fragment of the image. 

Forms is periodically evolving with new graphic and sonic algorithms, and is being permanently streamed at Playmodes’ Twitch channel, 24 hours a day during the pandemia lockdown.

Forms is a real-time audiovisual synthesis exercise.
Driven by a set of rules for graphic generation based on randomness and probability, a 

forms-generative-visual-music

Forms: Generative Visual Music

ying

Translated ARGB signals from video footages into MIDI signals to create soundscapes and music with. Mapped  the MIDI signals to parameters in Ableton Live to manipulate the live audio recorded. The MIDI signals were also mapped to pitches.  A reflection of my time studying in Guildford and my first attempt at data-based composition, created using Max and Ableton Live.

Translated ARGB signals from video footages into MIDI signals to create soundscapes and music with. Mapped  the MIDI signals to parameters i

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