Weeknotes: Tapestry, Robots, and Data

Started teaching this week and the world still moves. Having had conversations with the other staff (that will be ongoing), I sketched out some ways of donating data from the Unheard City project and using phones around it. It is a challenge. No doubt the work will change and move, but it raises some interesting non-technical challenges that affect the technical aspects. These are not just user experience for upload but include privacy challenges and re-use later. So much more to be done, but the frameworks that I have been looking at may have applications to the things that I am already doing.

While I was doing some of the work above on data donations, I quickly wrote up a tool that I am currently calling Tapestry. I created some scripts to explore audio on Tiktok and create a meta-audio file that had different designs and patterns. I focused on timelines but the idea of repetition seems to be possible. The idea is that one can not only make audio files but that it has a simple way of approaching it that is not based on the an understanding of audio. I am hoping that it becomes a way of rapidly developing files in digital methods projects to make audio more available as a research object.

I have been thinking a bit more about the Robots sonifications. I am wondering if there is some way of “editing” the data to get some more focused sonic objects. I had some ideas about future designs or experiments while walking this morning that do need a good test.

Added: Meanwhile, the rewrite of the thesis towards being a book continues.


Weeknotes

After a holiday, it has been slow in getting back into gear. I picked up an administration task to help identify the courses that students had chosen. It was for our administration team and I had a few hours to complete it and get it live. It does need some work and there are a […]


Weeknotes: Models and Mentors

I have been having a break recently so not much done. I did start some work on looking at the Maestro dataset metadata for a paper abstract. I have been querying it for the authors and mean times of the tracks (based on MIDI according to the website) as well as working on extracting some […]


A permissioned duree and other app studies work

A few months ago, I poked around the current permissions on the Android phone and to look at various ways of thinking about this as a reading or a history. One such drew from Fernand Braudel’s Long Duree. Using a series of tags on an old permissions file (this was originally done a couple of […]


Weeknotes

The last couple of weeks have been working through some policy documents and their attendant forms, which was less fun but important. The second main bit was doing some audio work. Using some converted Tiktok data, I had a play around with generating networks, timelines, and a meta-audio file. This latter is a mash up […]


Weeknotes

It’s been a while. I did submit my first grant but unsuccessfully. I can take that on board for future. I did write a lightweight scraper for the Internet Archive to do some digging around after getting some files for a sonification project. I also updated some Scopus and Crossref scripts to query for a […]


Weeknotes: Proposals

I submitted my first proposal this week. I am hopeful (or I would not have submitted) but it has brought things into focus. I do not want to say anything else yet but it has clarified a few things and directions. I now need to finish some other work – as the Audio Mostly deadline […]


Sound and the Environment

A slightly belated post but the Guardian have a useful piece about soundscapes for the environment, that I take as sound methods within the Anthropocene. It’s not really part of my research but the ideas of sound to engage with the unheard under our feet. Sonic and environment certainly dates back to R Murray Schafer […]


Automating documentation using Python

One of the tasks for this week was cleaning up after an infrastructure move and then updating all the documentation. Given that there are many forms of documentation, it was a bit of a task. I ended up putting together a spreadsheet of the main details so that there is a canonical reference. The first […]