Songs of the Ottawa - A Confluence of History, Sound, and Digitization

A little while back, friend and blogger John D. Reid of Canada's Anglo-Celtic Connections, knowing of my interesting in history and music, sent me a link to a site called Songs of the Ottawa. This site is the result of Christina Wood's Master's Research Project at Carleton University in Ottawa.

Screen capture of the SoundCloud representation of "Hearing the River's Flows"

 What was posted on the web site got my attention is several ways:

• Through the use of data sonification she created songs that you could not only hear but also see through the posting of the songs on SoundCloud. You could see the patterns in the SoundCloud representation of the music that she talked about in the pages of two of the songs: "Hearing the River's Flow" and "On the Water"
• As a IT professional that uses various scripting language to do my work, being able to see the Python code that she used to create the sounds was kind of cool.
• Finally, seeing historical events presented in a different fashion, other than words on a page, got to me wonder what we might be missing when we, as genealogy and family history researchers, only concentrate on names, dates, and places and births, marriages, and deaths.

The music that was created is definitely not for everyone. However, due to the influence of several members of the National Arts Centre Orchestra, I've grown to appreciate music in all of its forms. With their repetitive patterns these works remind me of some of the new compositions I've heard over the past several years.

From a genealogical research point of view, in her essay she highlights the various resources that she used to find the data to sonify. These are many of the same resources that we can also use to delve deeper in the events that shaped our ancestors lives.

So if you have the chance, take the time to listen to the three songs and also read her essay. I hope you find it as intriguing as I did.

If our ancestors are the notes on the page, collectively they make up the symphony that is us.