Silent Disco: The Sound of Data

Our 'Silent Discos' are based on tutorials from the Programming Historian website.

Participants will meet for a brief introduction to the subject, and then you'll work on your skills at your own pace. The facilitator will be available in Teams Chat to reply to any questions that arise during the workshop and help troubleshoot or explain issues.

This workshop on the Sound of Data is a gentle introduction to sonification for historians. There are a number of guides out there that will help you visualize past data, but this lesson will help you hear the past by using a method called data sonification. The crux of sonification is to use non-speech audio to convey information as an auditory perception, which has multiple advantages and can be deemed as an alternative or complementary to visualisation techniques.

In this workshop, you will be introduced to three different ways of generating sound or music from your data. You will see that ‘sonification’ moves us along the spectrum from mere ‘visualization/auralisation’ to actual performance. For this we are going to explore three software tools: Musicalgorithms, MIDITime and SonicPi. 

Those who have booked their place will receive an email with full details and a link to take part in advance of the live session.