Sonification & The Problem with Making Music from Data
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended as an incisive look at the real potential and common misuse of data sonification, often brought up in threads on space sonifications.
What it is
Tantacrul examines sonification, the practice of turning data into sound or music, and critiques how scientists and musicians, including NASA and CERN projects, use it well and poorly.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2020 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec jw1224 · 2020-06 · on “MuseScore 4: Moving from notation software to composition software”
As soon as I saw this pop up on HN, I thought “hey, MuseScore — isn’t that the notation software Tantacrul loves to hate?”. I’m not a composer, and I’d never heard of let alone used MuseScore before stumbling on his videos a couple of weeks ago. What a great surprise to see they’ve been listening to their critics! After finding his channel I slowly worked my way through watching all his videos. One of my favourites is about “sonification”, or creating sound from of data. Might be quite interesting to the HN crowd: [this video]
Recommends omnicognate · 2022-08 · on “New NASA Black Hole Sonifications with a Remix”
Tantacrul has a typically incisive video [1] about the real potential of sonification as a powerful technique for understanding data, and its real artistic possibilities, vs the dishonest and arbitrary way it gets used to generate publicity. [1] [this video]
Cites richbell · 2024-10 · on “Hear the sounds of Earth's magnetic field from 41,000 years ago”
I'm reminded of "Sonification & The Problem with Making Music from Data" by Tantacrul. [this video]