Music 220a - Homework 1: Data Sonification

Chuck Files / Data Files

Jungle Fever

My piece is entitled "Jungle Fever", due to the data being sonified (reports of chicken pox and mumps during the 1900s) and also due to the fact that (according to one source) it sounds like calls of monkeys in a rainy jungle. For the first 20 seconds, only the mumps data is audible.

Sources

So, in detail, each sample is the number of reported cases of the disease per month (either mumps or chickenpox) in New York City from 1928-1972. Not exactly glamorous data, but the seasonal nature of these diseases lends them to a rather predictable auditory pattern. To highlight this cyclical aspect of the diseases, only the data that is one standard deviation above the mean of each dataset is audible.