ULTRA BUNDLE
SONIFICATION BUNDLE
MAX AUDIO BUNDLE
MAX MIDI BUNDLE
MIDI TOOL BUNDLE
MAX MUSICIAN BUNDLE
LOOPER BUNDLE
X-FX
MOD SQUAD PRO
MIDI TOOLSET 001
MIDI TOOLSET 002
LIVE TOOLKIT BUNDLE
DRIFT KIT 001
LIVE TOOLKIT 004
LIVE TOOLKIT 003
LIVE TOOLKIT 002
LIVE TOOLKIT 001
SIGNALS
Amplifying theory and exploring technique
001: WHY SONIFY?
Noah Pred
Modern music-making is primarily viewed through the lens of self-expression.
Is this approach more limiting than it seems?
Expanding creative process to explicitly integrate the larger flows of information and experience that shape our world is a driving concept behind contemporary sonification. By making real-world phenomena intuitively playable, emerging sonification instruments such as Loud Numbers or our own Sonification Tools are designed to provide artists new ways to engage with the often-overlooked patterns in which we find ourselves enmeshed.
The result is a creative process that can express the self embedded in a wider context, in conversation with environments, histories, systems. It becomes a method to discover inspiration in unexpected places, to break free from assumptions, to question dominant narratives, to express the invisible. Sonification has the capacity to transform not just our creative approach, but our relationship to the world.
As a practice, sonification itself is nothing new. But until recently, the process of turning numeric data into sound was mostly limited to scientific researchers or composers with coding expertise. Despite untapped potential, it hasn’t been widely accessible—until the recent arrival of tools that allow musicians and producers without any coding background to easily transform datasets into custom musical elements.
This approach also shifts the artist’s role from sole creator to conscious collaborator with the world itself. Rather than composing strictly “from scratch” (a debatable concept anyway), we interpret and transform existing structures into sound, shaping flows of data into sonic invocations, then augmenting or jamming away with them. This process invites us to listen to the systems that shape us—and create along with them.
Image: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, P. Zeidler
Instrumental music tends to lack explicit meaning. Sonification aims to resolve this by enabling artists to make otherwise non-verbal music implicitly “about” something. Sonification embeds meaning without relying on lyrics or readable text. So a sonification-based work might translate climate data into melody, express social statistics as rhythm, or shape harmonies from seismic activity or actuarial data. These mappings don’t dictate interpretation, but offer a new framework for musical meaning.
In a visually-dominant culture, sound can mobilize inanimate data into affective experience that resonates beyond the intellect, bypassing typical information processing, giving voice to the unheard. But every dataset has a history and at least some form of bias. So before sonifying data, we must ask: Who collected it? Using what tools or methods? What was measured? What was left out? How was it categorized, and by whom?
Data, like sound, is not neutral. Economic indicators favor financialized Western systems over informal economies. Social data reflects cultural and methodological biases in the way questions are framed. Even “raw” scientific data is shaped by the tools and choices behind its measurement.
Ideally, sonification encourages artists to interrogate data, not merely accept it. By remixing, juxtaposing, transposing, or interpolating multiple sources, musicians can reveal bias, highlight gaps, weave connections, and challenge narratives. Sonification becomes a tool for critique.
But these approaches can of course raise ethical questions—especially when using controversial data. While it makes the invisible audible, it can easily distort, misrepresent, or sensationalize. How can we responsibly sonify climate collapse, social inequality, or human migration? Which data deserves amplification? What gets left unheard?
A key risk is aestheticization: turning crisis into spectacle. Financial crashes or human rights abuses, made into music, risk detaching sound from suffering. Yet a purely neutral approach might fail to engage listeners at all. There are no easy prescriptions here, but it’s crucial artists find their balance between creative expression and the demands of the data expressed.
Sonifying data isn’t just technical: it’s both an aesthetic and ethical act. The choice of scale, key, and instrumentation shapes perception: a minor key could evoke unease, where the same data expressed through a major scale might trivialize impact to an inappropriate degree. Should sonification match the emotional weight of the data, or embrace abstraction—even irony—at the risk of detachment? Even so-called “neutral” choices—mapping data to raw Hertz values—involve at least some degree of arbitrary decision-making.
Photograph: Udo Siegfriedt
Our tools let users map data onto scales, synthesis, parameters, effects, and even alternate tunings (thanks to Live 12), enhancing expressive capabilities while maintaining connection to the original dataset. By making these decisions with intention, artists use sonification as more than a tool for data translation: it becomes a method of critique, intervention, and re-imagining.
So on the one hand, traditional sonification focuses on decoding, making complex information audible: listening to black holes, analyzing markets, or enabling data accessibility for the visually-challenged. This approach treats sound as a valuable clarifying lens. In complimentary contrast, the Open Sonification approach embraces playful musicality as a wholly valid form of data expression.
In addition to these vital approaches, we propose a third, more surreptitious technique: sonification as a method of encoding. Rather then just making data audible, our tools let artists embed, obscure, or transform data within their compositions. By encoding data as waveforms or MIDI patterns, the numbers don’t just speak; they become structural elements, perhaps unrecognizable yet fundamentally entwined.
While field recording captures sonic snapshots of environments, image sonification translates places, moments, and memories into sonic expressions, gesturing toward new types of synaesthetic creativity where light, color, and motion become musical materials. A satellite image of a melting glacier might be shared as gradually detuning harmonies, a clearcut forest as fractured intervals. Using this method, a single image can now become a portable, (re-)generative score, producing entirely different sonic interpretations depending on how it’s mapped.
No longer static artifacts, images become a new form of holistic data storage: both an archive and an interactive composition. Any JPG or PNG can act as a preset for our Data Synth (translating images into waveforms), Data Mod (translating images into signal modulation patterns), or Data MIDI (translating images into patterns of notes). This same “preset” approach can also apply to spreadsheets, video files, or even text files.
The conventional purpose of text is of course to carry meaning on its own. But with text sonification, we can transmute it into something else entirely: a raw material, an encrypted code, a new musical language. Our text sonification maps ASCII values to melody, rhythm, synthesis, and modulation, reshaping the cadence, repetition, and structure of language into sound.
Beyond simple transformation, this process lets artists encode poetics into music. A phrase, once sonified, may lose legibility, but remains woven into the composition. A track might carry the ghost of a poem or the rhythmic pulse of a deleted document. Meaning is both concealed and revealed, present yet transformed. Text sonification re-encodes meaning, resisting easy interpretation. It blurs lines between message and music, offering a way to speak through sound in new ways.
Like encrypted messages, these hidden data, text, or image sonifications carry deliberately hidden layers of meaning, revealing themselves only to those who know how to decode them. Embracing this third mode of sonification—encoding—we expand its possibilities. No longer just a scientific tool or an artistic abstraction, this aspect balances revelation and concealment, structure and expression, meaning and message.
Using this methodology, we can trace a full circle back to a new vantage on self-expression. The encryption approach directly encodes personal records into musical expression: journal entries, letters, old photos or videos become raw musical material, available for translation into melody, harmony, rhythm, and sound. Beyond evoking nostalgia, memory becomes active and adaptive. Woven into the fabric of a composition, it retains the essence of its input while relinquishing explicit meaning. Personal history can evade lyrical expression and surveillance, deployed instead as hidden structure.
Some will understandably contend instrumental music doesn’t need external inputs, that self-expression and intuition already connect deeply to the world. So: why sonify?
Sonification isn’t a replacement for instinct or emotion. It’s an expansion of how instinct and emotion can be explored. It doesn’t need to impose rigid rules or over-intellectualize the creative act. Instead, it opens new entry points to the creative process: new ways of engaging, even jamming with the world. The choices—which data to sonify, how to map it, what to emphasize or obscure—remain entirely artistic decisions.
And what about misrepresentation? Once captured and converted to a new format, all data becomes subject to interpretation: any graph, report, or translation relies on distinct choices in how they’re framed and presented. Sonification embraces this subjectivity, turning data into a site of engagement, not just observation. A rising temperature curve or financial collapse might be conveyed atonally or harmonically, as acceleration or fragmentation—not as a replacement for analysis, but as a way to feel, reflect, respond, subvert. Sonification doesn’t just make data audible—it can bring it to life with newfound resonance.
In this way, the Sonification Tools we’ve developed are more than just functional devices. They’re an invitation: to explore, experiment, and engage with data—and the world that produces it—as fundamentally creative material. Sonification invites us to listen to our world in new ways.
At a time when global culture is visually oriented, algorithmically filtered, and increasingly dissonant, when we are conditioned—or forced—to tune out the complexity of the systems that sustain (or threaten) us, sonification offers a new way to tune in. What does the world have to tell us? What can it say through us?
Understood not just as a compositional tool but as a philosophical stance, sonification offers a path to integrate musical practice more deeply with the world: revealing patterns, prompting reflection, and opening creative and critical possibilities that can only emerge from an expanded web of relations.
REFERENCES
Greenfield, A. (2017) Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life. London: Verso Books.
Ji, Z., Hu, W., Wang, Z., Yang, K. and Wang, K. (2021) ‘Seeing through events: Real-time moving object sonification for visually impaired people using event-based camera’, Sensors, 21(10), p. 3558. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3390/s21103558 (Accessed: 2025.02.10).
Loud Numbers (n.d.) Tools. Available at: https://www.loudnumbers.net/tools (Accessed: 2025.02.10).
Vickers, P. (2016) ‘Sonification and music, music and sonification’, in Cobussen, M., Meelberg, V. and Truax, B. (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Sounding Art. London: Taylor & Francis, pp. 135-144.
Worrall, D. (2009) ‘Using sound to identify correlations in market data’, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 5954, pp. 202-218. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12439-6_11 (Accessed: 2025.02.10).
INFLUENCES
Sun Ra · William Gibson · Stephon Alexander · Kate Crawford · Paul D. Miller · Tanya Tagaq
Ryoji Ikeda · Trevor Paglen · Christina Kubisch · Raven Chacon · Christian Bök · Refik Anadol
SONIFICATION BUNDLE
DATA FX
DATA MIDI
DATA MOD
DATA SYNTH
SOLARUS