Experimental Noisycharts sonifies data for improved accessibility

Nick Evershed, for The Guardian, describes Noisycharts, an experimental component for their in-house charting tool:

What does rising global carbon dioxide sound like? Or the crash of the pound? How about Sydney’s record-breaking rainfall, or the share value wiped out following Facebook’s pivot to virtual reality?

While all of these things have been frequently graphed, now we can turn them into audio as well.

Noisycharts is a new tool created by Guardian Australia to easily turn data into sound, with an animation to accompany it.

One of the examples uses a modulated dog bark to demonstrate how the sounds can match with the context. That seems like a fun path to explore.

Unfortunately, it’s not meant for public use (yet?). For that, you might want to check out TwoTone.

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Sonified animation of London Covid-19 rates

Valentina D’Efilippo, Arpad Ray, and Duncan Geere visualized and sonified Covid-19 rates and vaccinations in London Under the Microscope. Best viewed with headphones on. Geere on the sound:

Here’s how it works. There are two melodic saw wave drones separated by an octave – the higher represents cases, and the lower represents deaths. The chords that make them up each reflect the balance of different variants over time. As the data spikes, so does the filter cutoff.

The bassline reflects movement data. When people are moving around the city a lot, you hear the bassline move faster. During lockdown, when people were confined to their homes, it slows to a single beat for each bar.

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Sonification of Covid-19 deaths

This is interesting:

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Sonification of Covid-19 rates

You’ve seen the line charts showing case rates over time. The focus is on trends and whether things are getting better or worse. This piece by Jan Willem Tulp focuses on the current rates with tickers and a sonification of new cases.

Ding, ding, ding. There’s a new ding for each new case as you look at the page, based on a weekly average for each country tracked by Our World in Data.

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Sonification of Covid-19 rates

You’ve seen the line charts showing case rates over time. The focus is on trends and whether things are getting better or worse. This piece by Jan Willem Tulp focuses on the current rates with tickers and a sonification of new cases.

Ding, ding, ding. There’s a new ding for each new case as you look at the page, based on a weekly average for each country tracked by Our World in Data.

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TwoTone is a tool to sonify your data

TwoTone, by Datavized and supported by the Google News Initiative, is a straightforward tool to sonify a dataset. Upload your data, select the metric, speed, and instrument, and you get a tune output.

If you thought visualization was tricky perceptually, then you’re in for a treat with sonification. The two most useful examples I can think of off-hand were event-based, so maybe start with something like that.

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Nine rounds a second sonified

The New York Times used sonification along with a dot plot to demonstrate the speed of gunfire in Las Vegas. They compared it to the shooting in Orlando and an automatic weapon.

It is possible that the Las Vegas gunman modified his gun to fire faster. This could include using a trigger crank, a mechanical add-on that is rotated like a music box handle and hits the trigger multiple times per second. Or, he may have had a bump fire stock, which uses the recoil of the rifle to fire quicker. Neither device is regulated by the National Firearms Act.

Uggh.

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