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Sonification & The Problem with Making Music from Data

Tantacrul · 259.1K views · 2017-07-13 · 14:48

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Overview

Tantacrul examines sonification, the practice of turning data into sound or music, and critiques how scientists and musicians, including NASA and CERN projects, use it well and poorly.

On Hacker News

Recommended as an incisive look at the real potential and common misuse of data sonification, often brought up in threads on space sonifications.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2020–2024

Topics

Music theory, synthesis & productionData visualization & information design
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sonificationmusicdatanasaaudification

What people said

jw1224 · 2020-06 · Strong recommendation

As soon as I saw this pop up on HN, I thought “hey, MuseScore — isn’t that the notation software Tantacrul loves to hate?”. I’m not a composer, and I’d never heard of let alone used MuseScore before stumbling on his videos a couple of weeks ago. What a great surprise to see they’ve been listening to their critics! After finding his channel I slowly worked my way through watching all his videos. One of my favourites is about “sonification”, or creating sound from of data. Might be quite interesting to the HN crowd: [VIDEO]

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omnicognate · 2022-08 · Recommendation

Tantacrul has a typically incisive video [1] about the real potential of sonification as a powerful technique for understanding data, and its real artistic possibilities, vs the dishonest and arbitrary way it gets used to generate publicity. [1] [VIDEO]

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richbell · 2024-10 · Reference

I'm reminded of "Sonification & The Problem with Making Music from Data" by Tantacrul. [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Tantacrul, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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