Sonification

My research is mainly centered around sonification, translating data into sound and the wider field of digital humanities. Furthermore, I have also worked on Brazil-related research such as the work of Lygia Clark and Cildo Meireles. My third strand of research is on sustainable fisheries through IoT.
Sonification in my case is firmly on the intersection of art and science: it is a way of practice-based research and the aesthetic component might make it appear to be more art than science. Because I have had the chance to do most sonification embedded at a University or a research institute, I am including it in my research category.
Besides this website, I also have a research blog about sonification where I discuss sonification art. I do not write regularly on it anymore but I keep adding to the database and sometimes I will add a new blog post of an interesting sonification work.
DataScapR
I have always been interested in the dynamics of the stock markets. I wanted to combine that fascination with my composition practice and became interested in During my PhD I developed DataScapR. DataScapR is my sonification toolbox. It allows composers to use stock market data to control musical parameters. There are two modes: real-time data and historical data. With historical data you can either control VST parameters or create scores. Due to Yahoo retiring its API, the realtime component does not fetch data anymore. For the historical data, you cannot download the data anymore fro inside the toolbox but you have to go to the Yahoo Finance website. More information on https://datascapr.wordpress.com
You can download my dissertation "Composition with Complex Data: A Contribution on the Mapping Problem through Practice-Based Research".
Outros Registros
Outros Registros is an immersive sound installation, sonifying police violence in Rio de Janeiro. Outros Registros makes the abstract numbers for which people have become numb into a harrowing aesthetic experience. In the video below, you can see the installation in the Arts Centre of Maré in Rio de Janeiro. You can find more information on on https://outrosregistros.wordpress.com


Song of Commerce
The Song of Commerce project is a project that came into being as a way to unlock archival material from the historical collections in the John Rylands library in Manchester, United Kingdom. These collections span ancient Hebraic scripture rolls, nature gravures, and trading records from the Owen Owens & Son company. These trading records document the activities from the Owen Owens & son company, a mid-sized textile trading company in 19th-century Manchester. As John Owens was the founder of what later would become the University of Manchester, the records are kept in the John Rylands library.
Looking at the dataset, the most consistent data in there, were the dates of the sailings and their origin and destination. I chose to work with these data as it would allow me to create a kind of rhythm of the seas. Spread out over the course of half an hour, the sailing of the ships would be sounding through ship bells. I created this as a stereo work, to be listened to in an installation setting: people can walk by, listen to a part of it and continue their walk.
Because the pandemic making public exhibitions difficult , I decided to make it available online.
This project was financed with a Digital Humanities start-up grant from the John Rylands Research Institute. I thank the librarians for their help in accessing the archival records and digitizing the trade bills.
Image by By Philip John Ouless - collection, Public Domain, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=98344468
Sonification Art
Sonification Art is a research blog where I document artworks that use sonification as a central element. I collected around 150 works in a database and continue to add to it. In most articles, I try to get in touch with the artist to get some inside information to make it easier to explain to the reader how the sonification process id deployed in the work. I write less regularly on it nowadays but will add to it when I find interesting works.
O Coro dos Minerais
O Coro dos Minerais (The Mineral Choir) is a residency project at the Museum of Mines and Metals in Belo Horizonte. I was selected with other artists to do a residency around the collection and the theme of the museum, using parts of their collection. Given the pandemic, some artists like me worked completely remotely and got help from the staff through Zoom sessions. With the Mineral Choir, I wanted to create sonification of minerals.
I decided to create sonifications of 10 minerals and consider them something like bird song: every mineral has its own unique song. I used a parametric mapping, meaning a datapoint of a mineral was mapped to a musical characteristic, for example, chemical elements were mapped to pitch, the length of the song was based on the age of the mineral et cetera. It is almost impossible for a person to listen to these sonifications and identify every chemical element of the mineral or other characteristics. However, it is possible to distinguish between the different songs in their entirety. So in this case, I consider this a case of a more poetic sonification than an exploratory sonification.
Because of the poetic aspect, I also linked it with Tetê, the resident extraterrestrial of the museum. I created a backstory that this creature has taught the staff how to listen to the minerals because humans could not hear them sing before. I also took cues from other stories like J.G Ballard's Vermillion Sands, a novel about a paradisiac place for rich people where people grow singing plants. Another inspiration was The Mystery of the Third Planet, a 1981 Soviet movie about an interplanetary safari expedition to look for interesting animals for the Moscow zoo.
You can check out the dedicated website. In the museum, people would scan a QR code and hear a random mineral playing. The choir aspect would come into being as people would put their phones next to each other with each one playing a different song. You can find a more detailed description on the sonificationart blog