From the Sea

From the Sea is a data sonifcation project that uses data from the UNHCR. I downloaded and cleaned the worldwide statistics of Vietnamese refugees to create a data driven piece.

I use audio from a famous cai luong song, named Ong Lao Cheo Do, about a man on a river. Using Tone.js, I play the file and read the number of recorded refugees each year to modify the level of distortion applied to the file.

On the web page, I have a brief text and image to describe the project and give contextual information about the refugee crisis. On the right of the project I display the year and number of recorded refugees. Below I display a wave form generated with Perlin noise and map the output to the refugee data as well. This gives an effect where the more recorded refugees there were the greater the noise wave.

Check out the project at https://emceelamb.github.io/viet-refugee-sonification.

Below is where I got the audio file.