Get creative with statistic-heavy stories using data sonification
As the old adage goes, numbers can have a numbing quality. When simply scattered throughout a story, the human angle can get lost. How else can you make the statistics pack a punch?
Turns out you can listen to data. If your story is multimedia, consider sonification; non-speech audio used to convey information and conceive data.
Data journalists Miriam Quick and Duncan Geere share their tips on how to do this in a piece for Datajournalism.com. Free apps like TwoTone, they suggest, can help you use sound to illustrate how something changes over time. For instance, take a listen to KQED Science's piece (below) on climate data from the 1600's through to 2016.
KQED explains: "The pitch of the tone you hear represents CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, while the pitch and intensity of the plucked strings represent temperature averages. Notice how the rise in CO2 drives a rise in temperature."
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