SonoraV19

SONORA_V19

A sonic interpretation of the reported daily active cases of COVID-19, from nineteen countries, and beginning the 22nd Jan, 2020. The work is updated for each new exhibition, with this latest published version, created for SoniHED 2022, extending to the 21st October, 2022.

The data-driven artwork focuses on nineteen of the earliest countries to report the SARS-CoV-2 virus, beginning with China, and then followed by Thailand, Japan, South Korea, USA, Singapore, France, Malaysia, Germany, Italy, Sweden, UK, Iran, Spain, Switzerland, Austria, Norway, Netherlands and Belgium (in that order). Each country has been given its own harmonic relative to the low 'C' assigned China (whose tone you can hear beginning first). As the number of active cases rises and falls, so do the volumes of each country's tone, with each day being attributed one quarter of a second. The result is a slowly changing timbre apparently depicting the transmission of the disease, but also bringing into question governments' manipulation of data, and indeed presentation of the pandemic.

The data source is drawn from the daily updated COVID-19 Data Repository by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at John Hopkins University. This information is then worked with using Symbolic Sound's Kyma software in order to convert the numbers into sound, and the result is updated accordingly. An accompanying visual element plots the data attributed to each country in a graph format showing the number of reported active cases per 1000 people, and this is gradually revealed in synchronisation with the piece’s development.

‘SonoraV19’ was first presented on the 24th March 2020, and since then has been featured by Sound Art Radio (Apr’20), Radio New Zealand (Apr’20), the digiArtFest (May’20), ‘Art The Science’ (May’20), Cultivate Gallery (Jun'20), In Toto Virtual (Jun’20), The Confinement Chronicle (Jul’20), the NewArtFest (Aug’20), Lisbon’s Museu Nacional de História e da Ciência (Jul’21), Auckland’s World of Light exhibition (Nov'21), the International Conference On Auditory Display (Jun'22), and the Conference on Sonification of Health and Environmental Data, Stockholm (Oct'22).

Art The Science - "Works - SonoraV19 by Robert Jarvis".
Embedding Info - How to embed the SonoraV19 audio player.
Exhibition Site - Webpage exhibiting SonoraV19.
Photos - photos relating to composition process.
Press Release - Details plus contact links.
Radio New Zealand - Interview on the making of the 'SonoraV19' composition.