Duncan Geere, Miriam Quick—Outlier 2021—Loud Numbers - Telling Stories With Data and Music

Loud Numbers - Telling Stories With Data and Music People have been telling stories with music for millennia. Music can uplift us, console us, excite us, scare us, and energise us. It speaks to the heart as well as the head. So why aren’t more people using it to tell data stories? Sonification – the practice of turning data into sound – has been around for more than a century, but it remains niche when compared to the explosive popularity of visualization. In this talk, we’ll look at some of the reasons why this might be and share what we’ve learned about effective storytelling with music and data in the process of creating Loud Numbers – the world’s first data sonification podcast. We’ll look at the landscape of sonification possibilities, from audification, through “earcons” and live data soundscapes, to complex parameter mapping. We’ll share what we’ve learnt about the kinds of data and stories that are most suited to clear, compelling sonification, and how to avoid confusing listeners. And we’ll go in-depth into one of the episodes from Loud Numbers Season 1 – explaining the story, the data, and how we encoded it into music. We’ll end with a world-exclusive preview of the final track from that episode. People who watch the talk will learn how to create powerful, compelling data narratives with sound and music, and get an exclusive first look at one of the most exciting data projects of 2021.