Sonification Tools v2 from Manifest Audio and Noah Pred can now sonify text, images, video, and OSC – plus it’s got an all-new 8-voice polysynth that lets you play that data like an instrument. Noah also reflects on what sonifying data can mean.
Sonification Tools was already an intriguing idea: make an easy way to feed numbers into Max for Live devices and turn them into sound. But V2 fleshes all that out into something that can really expand your palette. It also coincided with a great hands-on application, with a workshop built by Noah and Portrait XO for Berlin’s CTM Festival a couple of weeks ago.
This version gets a bunch of expanded features for turning text, images, video, and Open Sound Control into sound and music. (The first version focused mainly on data.)
Data MIDI and Data Mod expanded features: Euclidean and count-based trigger modes, data with or without decimals, and skewing
Text: with or without spaces, parsing characters or words
Image: JPG, PNG, TIFF, color channel, luminance, and various image controls
Video: MP4 and MOV loops, live feeds, image controls, and even polyphonic RGB output using Data MIDI
Data FX additions: invert, reverse, scramble, and bias, plus improved spectral filtration latency and more decimal and skew options
And then there’s the Data Synth. Start with data, text, or an image, and turn it into an 8-voice polysynth. Check the full feature set:
- Paste, type or generate data up to 256 characters with or without decimals
- Invert, Reverse, Scramble, and Bias a data set
- Type or paste Text, using spaces or not, parsing characters or words
- Image drag and drop or open JPG, PNG, or TIFF file to make a waveform
- select a color channel, luminance mode – or average all
- adjust resolution, color balance, brightness, contrast or saturation
- generate sequences across x rows or y columns in any direction
- Custom edit waveforms with easy drawing in all three source modes
- Frequency modulation with coarse or fine
- Dedicated noise modulation wave for texture
- Multimode + dedicated high pass filters
- Sub oscillator
- Four dedicated Envelopes
- Two LFOs
- Modulation matrix
There’s now a full walkthrough of that polysynth:
This approach also shifts the artist’s role from sole creator to conscious collaborator with the world itself.
Noah Pred
Some of your creations with these tools will be cosmetic more than illustrative; data can become a divination method or a source of uncertainty – a different pattern of noise. But even in that, there can be something cosmic. Noah reflects on what this all means in an opinion piece, following the workshop. Excerpt:
Sonification offers something different: instead of relying on pseudo-random generators, it draws from real-world data, turning the rhythms of weather, markets, ecosystems, or human movement into creative inputs. In the process, it inverts the concept of generativity from a sandboxed process to encapsulating all processes: universe-as-algorithm, endless flux filtered and crystallized as finite data points, available for creative conversion.
This approach also shifts the artist’s role from sole creator to conscious collaborator with the world itself.
Read the whole piece – it’s worth some pause whether or not you necessarily want to take this particular approach or these tools:
If you do want these tools, the full sonification library includes a ton of different takes on this concept. You can go for them a la carte or opt for the full bundle. That now includes:
- Data MIDI, a sonification sequencer
- Data Mod, which turns data into parametric control
- Data FX for transforming data into distortion, filtration, convolution, or sound
- Dataforge for translating MIDI directly in your MIDI clips
- Typewriter, a natural language textx MIDI clip generator
… and, of course, the new Data Synth.
Data Sonification bundle and full Sonification Tools
If you’re on Live 10 or 11, there’s also a legacy edition for your version.
If you buy something from a CDM link, we may earn a commission.
Looking for data? Check sites like Our World in Data – and here’s hoping DOGE and the current administration don’t destroy a lot of the free data available from the US government. I love my NOAA geoportal! And data.gov!
For a “vintage” example, there was this weather sonification Max patch from Ableton Live 9. (Has anyone found a way to get this working currently, actually?) And Micah Frank did an album of earthquake sonifications, plus released a library called Tectonic (though I think that’s now gone, too?)
Ableton also had this nice blog piece:
Sound the Alarm: Data Sonification as a Tool for Climate Action
Might be time for a refresher on that one! Let us know what you do with any of these.