I’ve been talking to folks about sonifying or music-i-fying data a lot lately; I even created a soothing, gamelan-like melody from my Gmail spam folder at South by Southwest last spring. But this particular example is, well … special.

I hesitate to share this, because a) YouTube numbers suggest you may have seen it already and b) it’s pretty depressing. On the other hand, it’s not like the fact the economy is depressing is news, exactly, so I suggest we employ the time-tested coping method that is laughter. Thanks (?) to Paul Norheim for this.

It also suggests a pleasing solution: the world economy just has the pitch control set wrong! Just start that turntable up again.

Or, more disturbingly, the fall of the economy is all part of some deep Schenkerian urlinie, a global capitalistic descent to the tonic. (What? No one up for some Friday afternoon theory humor?)

And yes, with apologies to the very-talented Microsoft Songsmith team, your product is becoming the new Hitler meme.

That’s it. We’re out for the weekend. I got nothin’.

Here’s a brief video snippet I discovered someone took at a talk I did at this year’s South by Southwest, with interaction design pioneer Joy Mountford (formerly Yahoo, Apple). We were talking about the idea of “data as art”, which happened to coincide neatly with the Design and the Elastic Mind show at MOMA, featuring several works from Joy’s recently-disbanded Design Innovation Group team at Yahoo.

The audience response to the work Joy showed was really overwhelming, as search activity danced around the globe and photos came to life in three dimensions. And it was nice to be able to show them the tool used to create these projects, Processing, and encourage people to try it out for free, even if they hadn’t tried programming before.

But I was surprised by how people reacted to a quick musical demo I closed with. Using Java, I wrote a simple program that checked my Gmail account using IMAP, then translated the time spam messages arrived into MIDI notes. I’m still developing a more advanced real-time version, so I threw the resulting SMF file into Ableton Live.

I’ll actualy be showing a newer version of this for Internet Week at an event sponsored by Make Magazine; more on that in a few days. (I’ll also use that as an opportunity to post some updated code.)

We spend so much time talking about how visualization can make data more expressive that we sometimes overlook other media. The spam “musicification” made sense to people partly because even the untrained ear is sensitive to musical timing, I think. Sonification of data isn’t always the right choice; the results can be abstract, though perhaps there’s value in that, too. But it’s worth remembering that people are sensitive to sound as they are to visuals. Since it’s not an either/or choice, necessarily, it’s too bad that so often designers neglect aspects of sound and timing while focusing only on what something looks like. It’s a challenge, certainly — there’s a reason most of us mute annoying sound feedback on computer interfaces — but I think it’s an area in which we’ll see a lot more discussion.

Now, data in smell-o-vision — that’s a story for another day.

For an increasing number of artists, data is becoming the raw material for creative work. Most of this has focused on visual media, but in the digital space, you can just as easily use sound. Sometimes the results are aesthetic only; sometimes they tell you something about the numbers being sonified. But either way, sound is a powerful medium.

“Weather Report” is a multi-touch instrument that makes music out of surface temperature data. The results feel a bit like US weather agency NOAA gone IDM. Fire up the multi-touch table, and you can “read” temperature data as sound. Co-creator Jordan Hochenbaum writes us:

I just wanted to turn you guys onto a multi touch interface I have been developing with a friend of mine here at California Institute of the Arts (his name is Owen Vallis). We had out first installation a couple weeks ago at Sea and Space Explorations gallery in Los Angeles and will be bringing it to Yuris Night Bay Area in April. The table is called “Brick,” and our first piece of software for it is called “Weather Report.” Were trying to use the table as a playable and meaningful musical instrument, so Weather Report uses Brick to sonify real-time U.S. surface temperature information into ambient and melodic mini-compositions. You can check out the website (we just put it up so it will constantly be updated shortly) for more information and photos, or check out our first youtube video @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45p_TPtQjR0

Are current plans for the table is making it more stable, and getting multi-touch finger tracking working nicely.

It was custom built and uses custom software written in Max/MSP/Jitter and Reaktor, as well as Reactivision (like the ReacTable).

Hope you like it so far! We are finding out new ways people like to interact with the table in order to refine how it is used, so the more people see and use it, the more usable and interesting we will be able to make it as a musical instrument.

brick: A Multi-Touch Sonification Instrument [Project blog]

CDM will be at Yuri’s Night, the global space party, in a very big way, so expect more!