Data Sonification: The Chaos of Kanye
Kanye West's chaotic career certainly makes for interesting data!
Some spikes in number of searches correspond with album drops, as it
would for most artists, but the largest spikes are from his other antics
(namely, the 2009 VMAs where he interrupted Taylor Swift and his 2016 political
rants and tour cancellation). I chose to sonify the entirety of Google's
history for this search because it matches the bulk of Kanye's career: his
debut album The College Dropout came out in early 2004, the first year of
available Google Trends data. With so many ups and downs, 80 seconds gave
enough time for some of the smaller spikes to emerge alongside the more obvious
ones.
In designing the synth, I wanted it to sound like some massive engine revving, the showbiz machine churning out drama and albums in equal measure. Additive synthesis was the first step for increasing the complexity of the synth's tone. The larger spikes were hard to listen to with sharper waveforms, so I went with 35 sine oscillators. I stuck with a linear scaling function for the date-time conversion but used a square root function when mapping search term popularity to fundamental pitch. This helped flatten the larger spikes, also making the final output a little easier on the ears. To get a bit more of the "revving engine" idea across and break up the smoothness of the pitch interpolation, I added an LFO to modulate the gain, giving the synth a tremolo effect. At 10 Hz, it adds a nice layer of warble and chaos.
In designing the synth, I wanted it to sound like some massive engine revving, the showbiz machine churning out drama and albums in equal measure. Additive synthesis was the first step for increasing the complexity of the synth's tone. The larger spikes were hard to listen to with sharper waveforms, so I went with 35 sine oscillators. I stuck with a linear scaling function for the date-time conversion but used a square root function when mapping search term popularity to fundamental pitch. This helped flatten the larger spikes, also making the final output a little easier on the ears. To get a bit more of the "revving engine" idea across and break up the smoothness of the pitch interpolation, I added an LFO to modulate the gain, giving the synth a tremolo effect. At 10 Hz, it adds a nice layer of warble and chaos.