Projects

Sounding Austin Tree Populations

The city of Austin has maintained an interesting database of tree locations along with species and diameter. The data are rather noisy, as they were collected in the process of other city surveys, but they can still be useful to produce some spatial art, and we can apply the principles here to other data sources later. The data looks like a CSV file more or less along these lines:

POINT(latitude, longitude), species, diameter.

In order to make an interactive soundmap of these trees, you have to do one of two things:

• 1. Compute the relative distance of a user's location to a subset of the nearest objects (trees in our case), looping over the nearest ones, as they do in this stackoverflow post.
• 2. Geohash the trees and the user, producing a number of location dependant tree-scapes, and allow the user's precise location to manipulate the sound.

While the first option is logically more similar to what we might consider a "soundmap," the second should be fairly easy to implement and maintain while still sonifying the available data, just with slightly less one-to-one accuracy. Importantly it does turn a table of unique tree locations into a sort of noisy database of tree populations. Considering that the data available to us obviously can't be exhaustive (you can't survey all trees) let's plan out the second solution, which will allow us to zoom out on the data while also adding user specific features later. We can even use Method 1 for something in combination with Method 2 if we so choose.

We can use Python as a little calculator and spreadsheet manipulation program to get the data we want. Without throwing out anything, it looks like a six digit geohash is the best bet, because it reduces the number of potential sites to around four hundred. Once we constrain our data a bit, we'll get an even more reasonable number. At six digits, you'll get one hash for a large chunk of a neighborhood. For instance, here is the geohash for part of the Cesar Chavez/Holly neighborhood: https://geohash.jorren.nl/#9v6s07 (boy, what a helpful tool this is!). Let's zoom out a bit and see what hashes contain a reasonable subset of Austin: https://geohash.jorren.nl/#9v6s. I would say that 9v6k, 9v6s, 9v67, and 9v6e get pretty close to the total area of the city, but it's still a lot of ground to cover. Let's narrow it to a smaller section. This will not be a complete sample, but just something to work with. This list grabs a lot of Austin both below and above the river, but cuts out plenty as well: "9v6kr", "9v6kp", "9v6s0", "9v6s1", "9v6s2", "9v6s3" (use the tool above to visualize them if you like). We've got about 140 hashes that match those coordinates...Now that's a fun starting point!

It'll take a bit of wrangling, but we can now assemble a csv file of each geohash and the trees in it, see the code above. Here's the code I used to produce a couple of different intermediate csv files before stitching together the final one.

Now what?

When we take a look at this data it seems like we've got (a) a lot of trees and (b) a lot of clustering of trees in specific places. While it's clear that our data have a few duplicates, we can manually work through those later, and they aren't going to really change factors a or b.

One way to think of our trees is in a sort of frequency spectrum, where different hashes will have different EQs (or even melodic content) based on the surveyed trees in their area. That sounds like a pretty good starting point, but there's no reason why we couldn't think of our tree-spectrum as rhythmic activity either, or as relative activity over time.

I've assembled here a quick video of a Pure Data patch which should explain how a basic version of a basic sonification patch could work: each non-zero tree population in a given geohash gets a note, and the duration of the note is related to the tree population itself. With a modulus function, we can even do something fun like assign pitch based on population as well: video!

And with that it should be clear what the scope of the project is currently and where it can go. Adding in field recordings of various sites, composing fragments, adding in "soundmarks" and generally playing with the data to make each geohash a unique listening experience are obvious places to take a project like this. See you in the next update!

Book Reviews

Getting Lost in the Funhouse of Free Will; Or, what if Gaddis Wrote “The Exterminating Angel”

Trois pas vers le sud --- Miquel de Palol, translated by François-Michel Durazzo

The truth of the matter is that the back cover tells you everything you need to know: a dizzying novel about doubles, fakes, life & death. Half crime novel, half espionage story, and half (in the imaginary plane perhaps) philosophical rumination, I'll be honest in saying there are still swathes of the story I don't fully understand. Perhaps a part of that is reading in French rather than English, but I do think that another part of it is Palol's deft capacity to slice away at plot until what's left is a kind of jewel, a refractive narrative that bends you as you pass through it. I have no idea whether all the information is truly there in this volume or whether reading other volumes of the Troiacord will "unlock" it for me, but I have to stress that I'm entirely satisfied in the muddle that it left me in.

My one issue, and this is a recurring element of Palol's work as I've been exposed to it, is that the women in his novels have a tendency, when they aren't unapproachably beautiful and mysterious, to pivot from what you could call "conceptual personae" to come-hither sexpots in a way that feels neither funny (though he's not above comic sex scene) nor really erotic. What's left is a sort of halfway place where it feels most like I can feel Palol looking over my shoulder, or perhaps I'm over his as he types, I'm not sure. The difficult thing is that desire and its orchestration, broken across categories (for capital, for artifacts, for knowledge and forgetfulness, for free will itself) is one of the themes being treated to permutations here. I can see an argument that the sex is one demonstration of game of multi-dimensional chess that Palol wants you to imagine is happening, one floor shaped by the architecture of desire, but this is all starting to sound suspiciously like homework. The reality is that I wish that I related more to the way the women act in this volume, rather than just seeing them reflected along a gem's flat walls. Perhaps that's also a case of reading in a second language getting in the way, maybe I'd have more fun with it if I didn't have to read lines twice, look up a word here and there.

As a final note, I'll say that critics have a tendency to stress Palol's training as an architect when they review his work, and even if it's a touch cliché, you can understand why they do so: the beauty here is rarely in single lines, and more in the broad sweep of a scene, the way you become the wind whistling through an edifice of enormous complexity. A refractive, architectural, sculptural novel.

In any event, I really enjoyed my time with Trois Pas Vers Le Sud. I'm greatly looking forward to getting lost in Autre Chose, and the rest of the volumes of El Trioacord in French.