Making Analytics Sing

Ok. It works like this.I majored in Music Technology (technically composition with that emphasis, but whatever). I've studied a lot of music synthesis techniques, sometimes from a music class and sometimes from a physics class. I also deeply, deeply love numbers, and would have gone for a math minor had I not graduated early.All tonal music is composed of periodic waveforms. The frequency of the waveform determines the sound's pitch, and the shape determines the timbre. There's a pretty good description of the physics of sound at numbera.com, and here's an image:Which looks kinda like this:Which got me to thinking: what would that analytics data sound like, if I could listen to it?I mulled this over for some time and finally went back to a reeeeeally janky method I came up with quite some time ago for creating audio files from a series of numbers. (At that time I just wanted to generate audio files from equations, but that will be another post.) Honest to god, it involved using my old Mac OS 9 (yes...NINE) computer with Hexedit and an existing Sound Designer II file, and basically sucking out the file's real content and replacing it with my stuff. To do that I had to do all of my work in Excel on my PC, normalize all the data, transpose everything so that negative numbers were accounted for correctly, convert each number to hex, put them all into a text file, drop the text file on a jump drive, move it to my Mac, open Hexedit, copy everything into the SDII file, save it, open it in an audio editor, and hope it looked (sounded) right. If it didn't it was back to step one.After struggling with that for months I suddenly had the brainstorm that maybe I should ask my totally AWESOME brother Adam, who just happens to be a computer scientist, if he could help me come up with something better. Goofily, I asked the day before his birthday. Because he is a man among me, he actually emailed me a functioning app the next day--before I even got to sing him Happy Birthday. So it was pretty much a happy (his) birthday to me! Now I can export a CSV file from Excel and convert it directly on my PC. We're working on additional functionality, but for now, I'm THRILLED with this. It means I can actually do this research.So there will be more posts soon with audio files.