/crowns-and-tears

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Crowns and Tears - Covid-19 visualisation using a music box, punch cards and too much of spare time...

How are you? Hope you are doing well! Here you find everything I used to make a Covid-19 visualisation from my home country using a music box and punch cards. Feel free to contact me!
Stay healthy!
Simon
journalist.ch

Crowns and Tears - How it sounds

See the visualisation

Crowns and Tears - What it should have sounded like

See the (artificial) visualisation

Here you will find:

Is is a data viz? Is it a data representation?

Good question. Maybe both? In the background you see the death rate per day as a curve chart with annotations. The music follows the data but does not represent it number by number. Here some background information how I made it:
My first approach was: Let's give each note a number of death. Ofter composing couple bars I had to acknowledge: That's not how music works. Intensity and emotion in music is not about stacking more notes together. Sometimes nothing can hit you more than a quarter break. Dissonancec, tempo, chords, dynamics - so many things bring music to live. So I changed my approach and tried to write a corresponding soundtrack to the data. On the right side of my screen I had the data, day by day. Ond the left the music notation software. I went through every day in the data and looked for the corresponding sound, that respresents the data and still follows the rules of music.

How it works

I used Muse Score to compose the song. The python script does this:

  • Imports the sheets of music (it has to be saved as an uncompressed musicxml)
  • Converts it to an array where the lowest note (C) = 0. Each Array item represents a bar.
  • The array is now transformed into punch cards and saved as a SVG graphic.
  • The script now creates a PDF to print. I did not used this, I opend the svg in inDesign and added text.

What you should consider

  • I used this music box from Banggood.
  • I wrote it in C-Mayor (A-Minor) but the music box is actually in A flat major (or something like that).
  • If you like to play the same note twice, you need to leave some space between (at least a quarter, like the «days» in the video above). Otherwise the music box is not able to play it.
  • I printed it on 160g paper and sticked it to another 80g paper.
  • Ask your doctor if you get a typewriter's cramp from stamping out the cards...

Behind the Scenes