Wrong numbers, wrong melodies

an electronic traffic short symphony Transforming wrong into right!

Instructions for playing the sound piece.

To play the “Wrong numbers, wrong melodies” please go this link and press play on the editor. Please make sure the tab is not muted, or the web browser or speakers. It sounds better and more interesting on a good stereo system or good headphones. Once you press play the sound should start after about ten seconds. The duration is a about 3 minutes. Enjoy or at least suffer well…

https://editor.p5js.org/nicosanin/sketches/aYubidRv

In this 3 minutes and 35 seconds duration  sound piece, the idea was using data to create sounds that somehow evoked the data that triggered the sound. I started with the idea of traffic sounds or “noises” as the material to be used. Then the idea was to find data that would be related to traffic. I found an interesting dataset among other interesting thing sources. It’s a dataset the city keeps about the traffic collisions.

The dataset contains details like the time of the events, the location (latitude and longitude), the borough (five boroughs), the cause of the accident, the type of vehicles involved, and the most important, the amount of injured or dead people involved in the accident. I started to think about what to do with the data.

At the beginning, I pretended to trigger sounds of cars, as I previously did with the previous experiment I called Hell-ectronic music. I thought about associating them to the boroughs where the accidents happened. I tried, but it sounded like hell and not too much like music. Another issue was not really having clear criteria about which sound to match each borough. Then I realized the most important and interesting data to use, was the number of injured people or killed people. It is the reason to be for the data. So it can be used to measure how dangerous the streets are on time. And off course to encourage changes in this regard, to make those numbers to be as closest to zero as possible.

Another aspect I wanted to play with was the equation between noise and music, and the limit of noise/sound/music to be listenable/enjoyable/tolerable or not. So I started thinking about which sound should I use to relate to the event of injured people. I came back to the idea of traffic sounds, and thought about some kind of ambulance or siren sound.

Then, as I listened to a song I realized that the main melody would be good for this purpose. The song is called “wrong”, by Depeche Mode. The main melody sounds like a siren, and the song’s video is very close to the idea of accidents and traffic. It has a feeling of a nightmare. Very similar to a recurrent dream I used to have when I was a teenager. So I started to look at the song and I found different versions. I finally found the melody without any other sounds. I used this version that lasts 43 seconds in total. I set it then to play whenever in the accidents a person or more were injured.

The result was very interesting to me. It sounds like some sort of ambulance parade, and also reminded me of the sound effect used in choirs, when people sing the same lyrics and notes in different time, so they overlap, creating some sort of atmospheric sound, like a musical canon. But, going back to the concept and idea of the database, it made sense. It evoked the increasing number of injured people through time, in a very emotional way. Also, you can sense when the number decreases at the end of the database sample when there are less of overlapped sounds, and then none at the end of the sample. When listening to the result, I can feel the contradiction of a beautiful or pleasing sound that was revealing a tragic or unpleasant or ugly fact. I found the final sound piece to be both beautiful and pleasing, but I also feel a lot of dramatic tension when I listen to it.