The Seinfeld Chronicles
Two years ago, dataviz legend Andy Kirk got in touch with my data sonification studio Loud Numbers to ask if we'd work on a project for him about the TV show Seinfeld. It's now out in the wild: The Seinfeld Chronicles is a huge, data-driven deep dive into every episode of the show - who's in which scene, who's getting the laughs, where it's set, yada yada yada.
What I love most is how it's presented. From start to finish, the whole experience has been hand-crafted to reflect Andy's passion for the show and his love of all the nerdy trivia around it. It's been a real labour of love over a long period of time - especially for someone who only found Seinfeld relatively late in life.
At Loud Numbers we were responsible for two things - the broad sound design of the experience, and a data-to-sound engine that powers the episode explorer. That engine turns every episode of the show into its own piece of music, inspired by the Seinfeld theme tune. Here's "The Marine Biologist", for example:
Each scene becomes four bars of music, and the instrumentation reflects who's in the scene. The "wildness" (for want of a better word) of how each instrument is played reflects how many laughs that character is getting. So if you hear George's saxophone tootling away in the background, he's just present - but if he's soloing wildly, he's driving the scene. (I'm also fairly sure it's the world's first sonification to feature slap bass, certainly this prominently).
It also got featured in the New York Times' "The Good List" newsletter, which called it "quirky, obsessive and, like the show itself, an entertaining exercise in overanalyzing the minutiae." I'll take that.
You can hear Miriam and I talk through how it came together, alongside Andy and the project's designer and developer Anne-Marie Dufour, in the final episode of Andy's podcast, Explore Explain. Grab some pretzels, or junior mints, or a big salad, and give it a spin. Serenity now!