Thread by @CarniDC

What does 425,000 Covid deaths sound like? I was inspired by this article by @LazaroGamio and @LaurenLeatherby for the NY Times, where they visualized how long to reach another 25k deaths. The piece had a rhythm that made me think of music, so I tried turning the data into sound

My first foray into #Sonification. The low pitched beat demarcates one week of time passing. The high pitched chime is another 25k deaths milestone passing. Then the white noise crackling sound, is all the individual deaths.

I ran the grayscale plot from the article through an image-to-sound synthesizer, where each black pixel triggers a sound. It is so sonically dense that it forms into a white noise, which increases in intensity as COVID deaths ramp up into the thousands per day

I added the weekly beat marker as a counterpoint so the interval between high pitched chimes had something to be compared to. Here is the original article:

nytimes.com/interactive/20…