TwoTone

Introduction to TwoTone

2022-02-10T18:00:00-05:00

Watch this introduction tutorial video to learn about how to get started using TwoTone. This walkthrough will show you the simple steps to get started with TwoTone so you’ll be quickly on your way to creating your first data sonification.

This tutorial uses the sample data set Honey Production in the USA (1998-2012), there are also several other spreadsheets built into the app to get you started and a handy tour built into the app.

For TwoTone documentation, visit ‘How it Works’ or the Githhub repo.

🆕 Do you want new sounds?

We are currently testing a new feature which lets you send notes from TwoTone and play them with sounds from other synthesisers or software! Are you interested in trying it out with your own setup?

Fill in the form to find out how.

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Using Advanced Features

2022-01-31T18:00:00-05:00

Watch this video tutorial to learn how to use advanced features in TwoTone. We use the Basque Country EUSTAT ‘Song of the Day’ example to walk you through how it was made.

To replicate or remix the project, you can watch the tutorial and then download the ‘Use of Time’ data set here or go to the source link here.

For TwoTone documentation, visit ‘How it Works’ or the Githhub repo.

🆕 MIDI Out Feature 😎

In 2022, we have added the much requested feature - MIDI Out support! This is an experimental addition which allows TwoTone to behave more like a music sequencer, for controlling synthesisers and more using the good old standard MIDI . We are currently inviting users to test the new feature.

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The Legend of Nixon - Presidential Approval Ratings as Video Game Soundscape

2019-03-18T09:30:00-04:00

This post is authored by Datavized CTO Brian Chirls

As a child of the 80s, I consider the original Legend of Zelda for the NES one of my favorite pieces of media. Beyond the gameplay and vast explorable world, I’ve always loved the sound. The way the sound effects layer on the music turn a short, repeated 8-bit loop into a beautiful reflection of the dramatic tension in the gameplay. The release of TwoTone presented an opportunity to remix these sounds and turn it into something practical.

Naturally, I thought of a sonification of Richard Nixon’s approval ratings as the perfect fit, for a few reasons. First, audio representation of data lends itself best to data on a timeline, since playback is itself timed by necessity. Second, Nixon had a particularly dramatic administration with a wide enough range of highs and lows to make use of many of the sounds that were used in the game. Finally, having happened in the past, Nixon’s presidency is a complete timeline, as opposed to the current President or any prospective candidates.

The Data

Presidential approval rating data are available from The American Presidency Project at UC Santa Barbara. It’s available in a clean spreadsheet that can import right into TwoTone but I had to process the data a bit to make it better fit the results I wanted.

The polls listed aren’t timed evenly, so I had to convert it to a table with one row every week, through the magic of VLOOKUP.
Add a column for “Margin” (i.e. approval minus disapproval) to account for uncertainty, and another column to normalize the value from lowest to highest.
Add another column for the normalized margin rounded to 10% increments, so we can avoid playing sounds for tiny increments that might represent noise, but without introducing inaccuracies.
Add a few more columns for weekly changes between values, so we can trigger sounds on rises and drops.
Add an “Investigation Status” column to trigger when the Watergate investigation starts and when it ends with Nixon’s resignation.

Download the spreadsheet

The Sounds

A sample of the original Legend of Zelda dungeon gameplay.

There several musical themes in The Legend of Zelda, and for this project I chose the “Dungeon” theme. It’s dramatic and dark, and it loops nicely to fit whatever lenght I need. The sound effects moslty represent actions the protagonist Link takes like the “sword slash”, things that happen to him like a grunt when he gets hurt, or the status of the game like the low health alarm that beeps when Link has only half a “heart container” left and can only take one or two more hits before he dies and the game is over. The goal of this project is to create a piece of audio that sounds like a typical playthrough of the game and also accurately tells the story of Nixon’s fall as represented by the data.

I was able to find online samples of individual sound effects from the original game, as well as an isolated music track, so I could map each of these to a data value. Most of the other example projects use “Scale” tracks that play musical notes on pre-determined a selection of instruments, but here I use “Narration Audio” tracks that allow me to upload my own sounds. On each track, I applied a filter, a simple but powerful feature in TwoTone that allows for complex layering of sounds based on numerical or categorical data.

Dungeon theme music - Looping music that plays throughout the entire range of Nixon’s presidency.
Sword Slash - Small increases in approval margin.
Get Heart - Large increases in approval margin.
Hurt Grunt - Decreases in approval margin.
Dungeon boss roar - Repeated during Watergate investigation, representing a looming threat. In the game, this sound plays when Link is in the same or adjacent room to the dungeon boss.
Low Health Alarm - A repeated beeping sound that plays when the player’s health gets very low, or when Nixon’s disapproval rating is 33 or more points higher than approval.
Death flourish - Music that plays when the player dies or when Nixon resigns.

The Result

The final composition plays for about a minute and a half and tracks Nixon’s approval rating as it starts relatively high and drops through the Watergate scandal and to his final resignation. It sounds like a short piece of real game play (especially for a mediocre player like me who gets killed pretty quickly).

I’m happy with how this piece turned out, but there’s room to do even more. There are sounds for other actions like picking up a gem (i.e. money) or a key and enemy attacks and defenses that could potentially be linked (no pun intended) with other data from the time period. If you’d like to try your own version, the original and processed spreadsheets are available, and you can find the various sound effects and musical themes with a quick search online. Or perhaps use a different game paired with data from a different President.

We’d love to hear what you come up with, so find us online @datavized and share what you’ve got.

TwoTone Workshop - NYC Open Data Week 2019

2019-03-11T14:00:00-04:00

Watch this workshop video to learn about how to use TwoTone to sonify NYC Open Data. As an official partner of NYC Open Data Week 2019, Datavized organized a TwoTone launch event on March 5, 2019. The public event featured an introduction from the Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics and demo of the NYC Open Data Portal and a demo of TwoTone using a sample data set built into the tool and sample data set from the NYC Open Data portal, a sonfication of NYC 311 Rodents Complaints from 2010 to Present. We also present a demo of NYC Outdoor Swimming Pool Attendance sonified and a walkthrough of the Basque Country EUSTAT example “Song Of The Day”using behavioral survey open data collected in 2013 to build a time-based sonification story.

To explore the NYC Open Data example in more depth, visit our post on sonifying NYC 311 Rodents Complaints.

And explore additional sonifcations of NYC Open Data such as NYC Art Survey, NYC 311 Call Center Inquiries, and NYC Public Wi-Fi Hotspots.

For TwoTone documentation, visit ‘How it Works’ or the Githhub repo.

NYC 311 Rodent Complaints

2019-03-04T23:00:00-05:00

The NYC Open Data Portal provides a list of all calls to 311 about rodent complaints, from 2010 to present.

For this sonification, we decided to jazz it up with instruments and rhythms that felt appropriate for the topic:

Conditions Attracting Rodents - Double Bass in a steady, seasonal cycle representing background conditions for the other data values
Mouse Sightings - small and high pitched Glockenspiel, almost cute, but not quite
Rat Sightings - a piano, played in unsettling triplets.
Rodent Bites - a recording of someone exclaiming “Ow!”, triggered once in each of the thankfully rare occurrences.

Since there were almost a quarter of a million calls over eight years, the data required a bit of editing to make it manageable. A simple pivot table suffices, with call dates grouped into months as row headers and complaint description as column headers.

Listen to the Data

Watch the Playthrough

Remix the Project

To view and and download the data set, or access via the NYC Open Data Portal or through the table preview below.

311 Rodent Complaints

US Cities Sustainable Development Goals Index

2019-02-28T15:02:00-05:00

Sonifying the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network’s first U.S. Cities SDG Index. Experimenting with track duration and arpeggio.

About the Data

UN U.S. Cities SDG Index

Listen to the Data

An example using the arpeggio feature

An example using adjusting the track duration, master tempo (BPM)

Watch the Playthrough

Remix the Project

To replicate or remix the project, download the ‘U.S. Cities Index 2017’ data set here, using the first spreadsheet labeled ‘Index’ or go to the source link here.

Mars Weather Report

2019-02-27T08:00:00-05:00

Mars InSight Mission is taking daily weather measurements (temperature, wind, pressure) on the surface of Mars at Elysium Planitia, a flat, smooth plain near Mars’ equator. What does the weather on mars sound like? Listen below.

Listen to the Data

Electric Guitar

Multiple Instruments (Wind Speed Filtered by Direction)

Watch the Playthrough

Remix the Project

Download the data set, or explore the latest daily weather
at Elysium Planitia at NASA Mars Insight Mission Daily Weather.

Basque Country EUSTAT “Song of the Day”

2019-02-25T15:02:00-05:00

Datavized collaborated with Basque Country EUSTAT to create a sonification with TwoTone using Basque Country EUSTAT ‘Use of Time’ data from survey data collected in 2013.

About the Data

Basque Country EUSTAT Use of Time

Average Social Time per Participant and Rate Type of Physiological Need Day of the Week and Province

Listen to the Data

Watch the Playthrough

Remix the Project

To replicate or remix the project, download the ‘Use of Time’ data set here or go to the source link here.

Watch the Tutorial

To watch the full tutorial on the making of this sonification, click here or view below.

Temperature of the U.S. Economy 1949-2028

2019-02-24T08:00:00-05:00

This example features a sonification of the U.S. debt to GDP ratio, yearly from 1949-2028. The data used is from the Congressional Budget Office Budget & Economic Outlook Report published January 28, 2019.

Listen to the Data

Watch the Playthrough

Remix the Project

Download the data here, or explore the data as published in the Congressional Budget Office Report - Budget & Economic Outlook: 2019 to 2019.

NYC 311 Call Center Inquiry

2019-02-22T08:00:00-05:00

The NYC 311 - Call Center Inquiry Dataset available on NYC Open Data Portal contains information on all agent-handled calls to the City’s 311 information line, including date, time and topic. As it’s a big data set, we filtered the data in the dashboard by Date to show only rows for February 1-10, 2019. We then exported the Rows as CSV (Excel). The file was quite large at 31.3 MB and 150,648 thousand rows of data from February 1, 2019 4:02:37 AM to February 10, 2019 1:00:37 AM. To adapt to TwoTone, we needed to minimize the file size and number of rows as TwoTone supports up to 2,000 rows of data and a maximum file size of 20MB. In Excel we filtered the data set by agencies with the most call volume by hour and sorted the data to show only the top ten agencies. We saved the cleaned data set and uploaded to TwoTone to sonify.

Listen to the Data

Watch the Playthrough

Remix the Project

Download the data set , explore the data from NYC Open Data Portal, or preview and download the data from the table preview below.

Table Preview

311 Call Center Inquiry

TwoTone

Introduction to TwoTone

🆕 Do you want new sounds?

Using Advanced Features

🆕 MIDI Out Feature 😎

If you would like to sign up to test on your setup, please reach out using the form which you can find below the video preview.

The Legend of Nixon - Presidential Approval Ratings as Video Game Soundscape

The Data

The Sounds

The Result

TwoTone Workshop - NYC Open Data Week 2019

NYC 311 Rodent Complaints

Listen to the Data

Watch the Playthrough

Remix the Project

US Cities Sustainable Development Goals Index

About the Data

Listen to the Data

An example using the arpeggio feature

An example using adjusting the track duration, master tempo (BPM)

Watch the Playthrough

Remix the Project

Mars Weather Report

Listen to the Data

Electric Guitar

Multiple Instruments (Wind Speed Filtered by Direction)

Watch the Playthrough

Remix the Project

Basque Country EUSTAT “Song of the Day”

About the Data

Listen to the Data

Watch the Playthrough

Remix the Project

Watch the Tutorial

Temperature of the U.S. Economy 1949-2028

Listen to the Data

Watch the Playthrough

Remix the Project

NYC 311 Call Center Inquiry

Listen to the Data

Watch the Playthrough

Remix the Project

Table Preview