The Centre for Digital Scholarship and the University of Oxford e-Research Centre invite you to a day of sound hacking.

Image from Johns Hopkins University: http://hub.jhu.edu/2012/11/07/timbre-hearing-prosthetics/.

We welcome anyone with an interest in sound, its production, reception, and technologies, and people who want to play with hearing their data. There is no requirement for technological, musical, or coding experience.

Sounds surround us everywhere, and in our urban and industrial environments we are permanently immersed in music and noise—alarms, vending machines, phones have familiarized us with mechanical sound as signal. Sonifications, or audiograms, are beginning to attract attention (including from BBC News and Wolfram Research), yet this area of study continues to be less studied than, for example, visual analytics.

The celebrations of Ada Lovelace’s 200th birthday demonstrated a larger interest in the intersection of machinery, music, and culture, and pushed existing disciplinary boundaries. The hack day will build on this and we look forward to developing ideas and approaches together.

Our hack day will experiment with ways of representing data with sound or music and exploring the sonic world. We encourage you to bring data and existing projects to share, and to start on fresh ideas. The day will encourage networking and developing ideas and projects, ending with a showcase of what we’ve produced and future directions we might take. We hope many of us will find new collaborators and be inspired to pursue new projects.