THE MASKED SCALES: THE SONIFICATION OF THE IMPACT OF COVID19 LOCKDOWN INTO A LOCKDOWN MUSICAL

The Project

We both love Space, Science, and Music. The COVID19 closed our schools. But we wanted windows to education to remain open in our house. So we decided to undertake a project to measure the impacts of COVID19 lockdown around us in terms of changes in street sounds, reduction in pollution, and decrease in vehicle count on the road. We created a home-built instrument containing sensors, Arduino, and a video camera to measure and record these changes. We used Arduino and Python to get data from the Sensors. We used Machine Learning to analyse the live traffic video from our house to see how much traffic count has reduced. As we love music too, we used the Music Algorithm software to assign each sensor data to a different instrument and notes. The tempo of the music was determined by the COVID19 Infection Rates and the change in City Lights readings in Toronto. We ended up sonifying or converting our entire dataset of 2 weeks into a Musical - the Lockdown Musical!

View this project on YouTube