A free VCV Rack plugin for data sonification.
Install from the VCV Rack library.
Right-click to load a CSV file, and then right-click again to select a column of data from that file.
Your CSV file must have a single header row containing column names, and you'll only be able to sonify columns containing numbers. Any missing or non-numeric values in your data will be replaced with null values that don't fire a gate.
Send a trigger signal into the TRIG input to process the first datapoint and move to the next one. Send a trigger into the RESET input to return to the start of the dataset.
The top two outputs generate voltages from -5V to 5V and 0 to 10V respectively. The lower left output generates 1V/Oct pitch CV, scaled to the number of octaves selected using the RANGE knob. The lower right output generates a gate as each new datapoint is processed - change the lenth of this gate with the LENGTH knob.
Q: What is data sonification?
A: Data sonification is the process of turning data into sound. It's a bit like data visualization, but you map numbers onto the properties of sound (volume, pitch, reverb, etc), rather than visuals (colour, shape, size).
Q: My CSV is invalid!
A: Use CSVLint to check if your CSV is valid. If it is, submit an issue and attach the CSV file you're trying to load and I'll take a look.
Q: I'm getting crashes when loading a CSV file
This is likely a text encoding issue with the CSV library, which I'm working on a solution for. In the meantime, try re-encoding your csv file to UTF-8, which should fix it.
Q: How do I make the output sound more musical?
A: Process the pitch information through a quantizer and consider adjusting the length of your dataset to a multiple of four.
Q: Where can I get some data to try it with?
A: Try sonifying climate data, or sunspot data. The Data is Plural archive is a great source for more interesting datasets.
It's the name of my data sonification studio. We have a podcast that's worth a listen if you want to hear what's possible with sonification.
To Mahlen Morris for his generous guidance in the ways of C++, and to Miriam Quick, Dewb, TomW, Obakegaku for thorough testing.