The Sound of Data (a gentle introduction to sonification for historians)

ποίησις - fabrication, creation, production I am too tired of seeing the past. There are any number of guides that will help you visualize that past which cannot be seen, but often we forget what a creative act visualization is. We are perhaps too tied to our screens, too much invested in ‘seeing’. Let me hear something of the past instead. While there is a deep history and literature on archaeoacoustics and soundscapes that try to capture the sound of a place as it was (see for instance the Virtual St. Paul’s or the work of Jeff Veitch on ancient Ostia), I am interested instead to ’sonify’ what I have right now, the data themselves. I want to figure out a grammar for representing data in sound that is appropriate for history. Drucker famously reminds us that ‘data’ are not really things given, but rather things captured, things transformed: that is to say, ‘capta’. In sonifying data, I literally perform the past in the present, and so the assumptions, the transformations, I make are foregrounded. The resulting aural experience is a literal ‘deformance’ (portmanteau of ‘deform’ and ‘perform’) that makes us hear modern layers of the past in a new way. I want to hear the meaning of the past, but I know that I can’t. Nevertheless, when I hear an instrument, I can imagine the physicality of the player playing it; in its echoes and resonances I can discern the physical space. I can feel the bass; I can move to the rhythm. The music engages my whole body, my whole imagination. Its associations with sounds, music, and tones I’ve heard before create a deep temporal experience, a system of embodied relationships between myself and the past. Visual? We have had visual representations of the past for so long, we have almost forgotten the artistic and performative aspect of those grammars of expression. In this tutorial, you will learn to make some noise from your data about the past. The meaning of that noise, well… that’s up to you. Part of the point of this tutorial is to make your data unfamiliar again. By translating it, transcoding it, remediating it, we begin to see elements of the data that our familiarity with visual modes of expression have blinded us to. This deformation, this deformance, is in keeping with arguments made by for instance Mark Sample on breaking things, or Bethany Nowviskie on the ‘resistance in the materials’. Sonification moves us along the continuum from data to capta, social science to art, glitch to aesthetic. So let’s see what this all sounds like.