Sonification of Hyde Park Purse Snatchings in Chicago (28 day periods)

I used a triangle oscillator and added reverb to it to amplify the spookiness of the atmosphere, to recreate the fear of being attacked at night. 

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(1) why are the values for gain squared?

Humans do not hear linearly. Instead, we perceive sound logarithmically. Squaring the values make the distinction between amplitudes larger and more noticeable to the ears. Furthermore, it would make sure that any negative values would be squared into positives.

(2) why use MIDI keynums for the freq values? What happens if they're mapped linearly, instead? 

MIDI keynums align with our perception of pitch, result in data sounding more ‘musical’, while linear mapping would result in data sounding more like noise or even indiscernible to the human ears.

(3) what happens if the 100 ms update rate is increased or decreased significantly?

The speed of the significations would vary - if the update was increased, it would be slower and vice versa.