The Sonification Machine
What does a cloudless sky on a warm day sound like? What about a rainy night, with the international space station passing overhead, and an internet full of bots? The Sonification Machine suggests an answer, allowing us to hear the physical and digital environment that surrounds us.
What does a cloudless sky on a warm day sound like? What about a rainy night, with the international space station passing overhead, and an internet full of bots? The Sonification Machine suggests an answer, allowing us to hear the physical and digital environment that surrounds us. Eight different soundscapes are created by live streams of data captured by global sensors.
Taking inspiration from Yuri Suzuki’s Ambient Machine, each layer can be switched on and off to build a unique audio experience - a collaboration between the listener, the designers, and the vast, invisible infrastructure that underpins society. With more than 250 possible sound combinations, and each sound changing as the world changes, the possibility space is vast.
This was a collaboration with my partner, Silvia Hüttner. I did the sound design, sonification, electronics, and code. They designed and built the physical housing The device was exhibited at the This is Not a Museum exhibition at STPLN during Gallerihelg 2025, in Malmö.
Inside, the whole thing is powered by a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W and a Raspberry Pi 5. The former keeps track of switch positions and the volume knob, and fetches the data from the web, sending the results over WIFI via OSC to the latter, which is running RNBO and doing the sound synthesis. An Adafruit speaker bonnet, mounted to the Pi 5, provides the sound.
This was a challenging project, bundling together lots of things that we hadn't done much before - including programming microcontrollers, building physical hardware, using CAD software, laser-cutting, using RNBO, and sending data over OSC. It's very much a version 1.0, and we'd like to develop it further in the future.