So as part of my academic studies, in the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design and Hebrew University of Jeruslaem, I'm taking a course with the baffling name of  "Sonification & Visualization". It deals with how to create visual and audible aids to allow people to perceive large data amounts of data easily.

Anyhow, for the midterm project we had to split into pairs and create a sonification that represents a large set of data. Me and my partner, Motomi Uruga, decided to convey by sound the results of the Olympics throughout the last century. We used as reference the brilliant visualization found in the NY times Olympics website, and after several sleepless nights, we present this:

For a better quality, you can download or listen to sonification:
http://solstice.co.il/sites/default/files/images/opher/son3_best.mp3

What the hell am I seeing\hearing?

The data set we used is the number of gold and silver medals won by different countries during the Olympics of 1896-2008.
We chose to represent five countries, each with its own unique instrument:

USA - Electric guitar

Listen

France - Oboe

Listen

Japan - Pipa

Listen

Turkey - Oud

Listen

Soviet Union - Synthsizer

Listen
 

Every year is represented by four bars. Our software takes the parameters for each of a countries, and creates a random melody where the number of gold medals control the velocity of the notes, and the number of silver medals control the pitch of the notes. All melodies are in the key of A minor. The note lengths and rests are randomly distributed using a statistical function that gives more priority to half and quarter notes, and less to full notes, 8ths and 16ths.

In addition, the beat of the drums is increased (in time, not in tempo) in accordance to the total number of countries participating and winning medals.

The cool thing is that you can actually hear some trends, like when in 1980 USA doesn't participate, or how over time the Soviet Union gains more dominance.

More technical details of how (and why) exactly we did this to follow...