SubMap: Visualizing Subjective Urban Patterns

What Twitter in Finland has to do with villages in Hungary and the solipsism of urbanity.

Maps, cities and data visualization are among our sharpest points of interest, so when the the three converge, we’re swooning all over. SubMap, which we stumbled upon on the excellent new ArtsTech News aggregator, is a visualization project that flies in the face of the traditional conception of maps as static and objective representations of the public world, and instead maps the subjective personal experiences of a city’s residents.

From locals’ favorite places in Budapest to Finland’s real-time Twitter chatter to a subjective map of the city plotting the cartographers’ homes as the epicenter, the maps are living abstractions of civic sentiment, part Hitotoki, part ComplexCity, part We Feel Fine, part something else entirely.

The project’s latest iteration, SubCity 2.0: Ebullition, captures 12 years worth of data patterns from origo.hu, Hungary’s leading news site, not only visually but also through a sonic representation.

In the 30 fps animation, each frame represents a single day, each second covers a month, starting from December 1998 until October 2010. Whenever a Hungarian city or village is mentioned in any domestic news on origo.hu website, it is translated into a force that dynamically distorts the map of Hungary. The sound follows the visual outcome, creating a generative ever changing drone.”

SubMap is the work of Dániel Feles, Krisztián Gergely, Attila Bujdosó and Gáspár Hajdu from Hungarian new media lab Kitchen Budapest, a hub for young researchers and experimenteurs looking to explore the intersection of mobile communication, online communities and urban space.

via Creators Project

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Hans Rosling: How the Washing Machine Sparked the Reading Revolution

It’s hard not to love statistical stuntman Hans Rosling. Last year, he mesmerized us with a phenomenal augmented reality run through 200 years that changed the world in 4 minutes, as a part of BBC’s excellent The Joy of Stats series. (If you haven’t seen it, do — it’s free online and absolutely fantastic.)

Now, he’s back with another blockbuster TED talk, demonstrating — with his characteristic blend of statistical rigor and delightful wit — that the washing machine was indeed the greatest invention of the Industrial Revolution, enabling everything from economic development through electrical efficiency to intellectual growth by reallocating free time for reading.

An interesting parallel emerges in examining Rosling’s talk in alongside Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus: The washing machine is the antithesis of television, freeing up the same kind of “cognitive surplus” — excess human creative and intellectual energy — that, according to Shirky’s central argument, TV absorbed, a parallel that bespeaks the universal duality of innovation and the incredible potential of technology as a force of social change the polarity of which we get to choose.

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Vintage Visual Language: The Story of Isotype

In the 1930s, Austrian sociologist, philosopher and curator Otto Neurath and his wife Marie pioneered ISOTYPE — the International System Of TYpographic Picture Education, a new visual language for capturing quantitative information in pictograms, sparking the golden age of infographics in print.

The Transformer: Principles of Making Isotype Charts is the first English-language volume to capture the story of Isotype, an essential foundation for our modern visual language dominated by pictograms in everything from bathroom signage to computer interfaces to GOOD’s acclaimed Transparencies.

The real cherry on top is a previously unpublished essay by Marie Neurath, who was very much on par with Otto as Isotype’s co-inventor, written a year before her death in 1986 and telling the story of how she carried on the Isotype legacy after Otto’s death in 1946.

Richly illustrated and contextualized with fascinating historical essays, The Transformer is a vital primer for a visual langauge that not only frames much of today’s communication but also speaks to us on a powerful intuitive level.

HT Information Is Beautiful

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Visualizing Loudness: The Dark Side of Music Digitization

From Bieber to boredom, or what 30 years of compression have to do with auditory freedom.

Last month, we explored 3 fascinating, synesthetic ways of visualizing music. Today, we’re applying the same cross-sensory lens on a more basic component of sound: Loudness.

The rise of digital music over the past decade has sparked a phenomenon known as the loudness wars — a detrimental sonic arms race to digitally master recordings with higher real and perceived levels of loudness, resulting in sound quality inferior to that of analog recordings like vinyl and cassettes. (You can see and hear the difference in action here.) To better understand these issues of sound compression, perceived loudness and recording quality, we’re looking — literally — at three visual approaches to subject that illuminate it in a visceral, intuitive way.

CHRISTOPHER CLARK

Created for a 2009 NPR episode on the subject, this stunning infographic poster by designer Christopher Clark visualizes the history of loudness through the changes in frequency peaks, dynamic range and RMS levels — the actual auditory components of perceived loudness — in different music genres between 1979 and 2009.

IAN SHEPHERD

From reader Ian Shepherd, whom you may recall as our volunteer photographer for Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything: Special Illustrated Edition, comes this fascinating infographic raising awareness about Dynamic Range Day — an effort to debunk the myth that loudness helps sell records, taking place on March 25h.

Using data from the Unofficial Dynamic Range Database, Shepherd pits dynamic range — the distance between the highest, sharpest highs and lowest, softest lows, which gives sound richness — against loudness, alongside sales rankings where available.

The results are somewhat unexpected — Justin Bieber’s My World 2.0, for instance, is far louder with much less of a dynamic range than Michael Jackson’s Thriller, the #1 highest-selling record on the chart. Coldplay (#48), typically perceived as “mellow” band in terms of sonic style, is actually far louder than iconic hard rock band AC/DC (#2) in technical terms.

DYNAMIC RANGE METER

Also from Ian, TT Dynamic Range Meter by the Pleasurable Music Foundation is a wonderful free tool for Mac and PC rendering real-time dynamic range visualizations that help not only mixing engineers, but also casual music lovers make informed decisions about sound compression. You can try it out as a free plugin here.

BONUS

For a deeper dive into the subject, this excellent talk by Earl Vickers from the 129th Audio Engineering Society Convention, framing the underlying problem of the loudness wars as a problem of game theory, is very much worth the watch. (Again, thanks Ian.)

If we look at some extreme examples, we see that hypercompression reduces contrast between verse and chorus, it takes the crescendo out of the bolero, removes the surprise from the ‘Surprise Symphony,’ and turns ‘Stairway to Heaven’ into a sidewalk.” ~ Earl Vickers

Even if people don’t consciously notice the problem, the music may become mentally or physically tiring. Listeners may lose interest without knowing why.” ~ Earl Vickers

If you’re like us and live most of your life with music, this should both worry and mobilize you. Thankfully, sound advisor and researcher Julian Treasure has your back with this great short TED talk on 8 steps to sound health.

And for an even closer look at the issue in its rich historical context, we highly recommend Greg Milner’s Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music.

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