by Cristian Vogel
I recently enjoyed listening to the ‘Loud Numbers’ series of data sonification podcasts from Miriam Quick and Duncan Geere. One particular episode — ‘The End Of The Road’ — left a lasting impression on me. In it, they present an environmental data set which captures the history of a declining population of local insects in Denmark over a period of 20 years. The environmental scientist Anders Pape Møller used a curious sampling method to capture the empirical data behind the resulting paper. He counted and recorded the number of insects killed on his windscreen as he drove the same route for 20 summers. Using this method of data gathering, rather than a net, he found an alarming 80–97% reduction in their numbers between 1997 and 2017. You can read the paper and see the data on Dryad.
I felt it would be interesting practice to make a few more sonic interpretations of the data, seeing as it resonated with me so. Indeed, one of the compelling things about the practice of data sonification is that results can sound hugely different even when derived from exactly the same data. Nevertheless, the imprint of the data shapes and intervallic relationships generally remain. It is a markedly different process to that of “shepherding” random numbers, which is common practice in many fields of generative composition and design. What often comes…
