Turning Data into Sound and Music.

Hello! This is the repo to go along with the Eyeo workshop on Turning Data into Sound and Music.

There are three examples in this repo: two (related) examples in Python, and one in p5.js.

Schedule (ish):

9-10:15

Introduce myself, what I do. Intro to data sonification in general - what kind of data works best, what kind of mappings work for which type of data? What kind of choices can be made?

We'll talk about the dataset we'll be working with (ufo sightings!), and go through any other datasets that participants brought in.

We'll go over (really) basic music theory.

10:15-10:45

Setup and installation (see installation section below). Feel free to take a break if needed.

10:50-12

We'll go through the Python examples.

12-1

LUNCH

1:15-2:15

We'll go through the p5.js example.

2:15-4

Independent/group work on your own sonifications/compositions.

4-5

Presentations of final work (optional) for anyone who wants to show and get feedback. Questions, discussion of anything interesting you learned.

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Installation and Downloads

We will help you with any difficulties during this section.

1) Download this repo

Click on the green 'clone or download' button. To clone using terminal, type:

git clone https://github.com/handav/workshop.git

and then

cd workshop to enter the folder.

Otherwise, download the zip file to the location of your choosing.

2) Check your Python version and install requirements

In your terminal, type python -V to see your Python version. There are examples here for use with Python 2 and Python 3.

To install requirements, type pip install -r requirements.txt

If that doesn't work, you can type:

pip install midiutil and pip install scipy

or else install a Conda environment:

Installing Conda

Conda is a environment management tool that will allow us to manage different python versions in your computer.

1) Install miniconda

• Go to https://conda.io/miniconda.html
• Choose Python 3.6 Mac OSX 64-bit (bash installer) and download

2) Open Terminal

• Type: bash /path/to/the/file/you/just/downloaded
• You can just drag the bash file you download into your terminal window from where you installed it
• Press Enter to continue
• Review the license and approve the license terms - type in yes and press enter
• Press Enter again to confirm the location of install
• Type yes when it asks you if the install location should be prepended to PATH
• Restart Terminal for changes to take effect
• Type: conda info
• If it prints out some stuff then it has installed correctly

3) Create an environment

• Open Terminal
• Type: conda create -n eyeo python=3.5.2
• Type: y (and press Enter)
• This will create a conda environment with the name 'eyeo' and python version 3.5.2

4) Activate environment

• Open Terminal
• Type: source activate eyeo
• You should see (eyeo) prepended before your terminal prompt

5) Install dependencies

• Make sure you can see (eyeo) prepended before the terminal prompt before proceeding
• Type: pip install -r requirements.txt

3) Download MuseScore if you haven't already

Please download MuseScore (https://musescore.org/en) or a midi sheet music reader of your choice.

4) Get Fluidsynth

Check this link to see how to best get FluidSynth: https://sourceforge.net/p/fluidsynth/wiki/Download/

For Mac users who have Homebrew, type: brew install fluidsynth

If you need to install Homebrew: https://brew.sh/

5) Find some cool sound samples

Our p5.js example will work with samples - there are some included in this repo, but you are also free to download some you like better. I suggest NASA's free library of space sounds:

http://cdm.link/2014/10/nasa-posts-huge-library-space-sounds-youre-free-use/

https://soundcloud.com/nasa (must be logged in to SoundCloud to download).

Remember that these are all different lengths. You can download shorter samples, or edit the audio with a program like Quicktime or Audacity.

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More about the data

The data comes from the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC): http://www.nuforc.org/webreports.html

And this repo, which has been cleaned up to create a field for duration in seconds: https://github.com/planetsig/ufo-reports/tree/master/csv-data

The included ufo_small.csv is a cleaned sample of 7 months of UFO sightings, taken from the above repo.

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More information about MidiUtil and what you can do with it:

https://media.readthedocs.org/pdf/midiutil/1.1.3/midiutil.pdf

Midi instrument numbers: http://www.pjb.com.au/muscript/gm.html

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Resources

https://programminghistorian.org/en/lessons/sonification

https://sonification.de/handbook/chapters/

http://www.algorithmiccomposer.com/2016/01/from-data-to-music-pd-as-sonification.html

Music theory for hackers: https://medium.com/@alwaysbcoding/an-intro-to-music-theory-for-hackers-8969ad4c1231