Noise for Waves and Grains

The Internet of Sounds (IoS) is an emerging research field at the intersection of the Sound and Music Computing and the Internet of Things (Turchet et al. 2023). While IoS traditionally involves networks of interconnected sound enabled devices called sound things which can record, produce and exchange sound data, more recently the generalised IoS architecture has been expanded to account for sonification, the mapping of data to sound in order to communicate something about the original data source (Roddy 2024). While that work explored the use of FM Synthesis techniques to sonify IoS data for application layer monitoring and analysis tasks in Smart Cities contexts, the piece introduced here is a purely musical application that applies sonifiction with wavetable and granular synthesis methods to turn noise data into an aesthetically engaging musical work.
Noise for Waves and Grains, is a data-driven musical performance piece that takes noise level data collected from a network of acoustic sensors distributed across Dublin city and uses sonification techniques to map that data to musical parameters. Data are mapped to produce musical notes
Data are mapped to midi note parameters constrained within a B aeolian mode. These notes are synthesised via wavetable synthesis techniques. Data are also mapped via CC values to control the parameters of the wavetable synthesisers (wavetable content and positions etc.) and to ultimately encode the data on the timbres produced. Wavetable outputs increase in both timbral clarity and complexity as average db levels from the sensor data increase and vice versa. These signals are passed to granular synthesis units. At this layer complex mappings are used to represent the data at the textural layer with db values defining both the audible clarity of the textures and the textural complexity of the sound. The result is a rich sonorous soundscape that operates as an aesthetic experience of the original noise data as rendered to sound by the wavetable and granular synthesis techniques.