## The whinny of the exponential horse

May 13, 2012

6

A Poisson process provides a good model for events that happen rarely. That's what von Bortkiewicz realized in 1898 when he modeled deaths by horse kick in Prussian cavalry; since it would be ungentlemanly to actually kill my readers, I instead represent the events in a Poisson process using a horse's whinny.

## playitbyr 0.2-1: data through sound, now with layers, facets, and more pleasure

May 7, 2012

2

The recent Sonification Handbook has a chapter devoted to exploratory data analysis using sound. With some help from Sam Ferguson, one of the chapter's authors, I've made it easy to implement those techniques using R with playitbyr.

## Sensual marimba sunspots

February 26, 2012

0

Here's the numbers of yearly sunspots, 1700-1988, brought to you by the nimble marimba of R: See ?sunspot.year in R for more information about the data. I did this last spring and just discovered it again. I've been so caught up in the current sound world of playitbyr (see this post for an example) that […]

## Diamonds vs. water smackdown in playitbyr-powered podcast

February 22, 2012

2

Apparent Reason, my new monthly podcast, is a boisterous and non-technical discussion of economics and statistics. In that format I don't have the luxury of showing charts and graphs to complement my discussion, so I use the playitbyr package to represent the data as sound. (Apparently February is a great month to start R-related podcasts! […]

## R's Distrotheque

November 29, 2011

0

(Update: The csound package is now available on CRAN.) Do your random variables need to groove more? Of course they do. That's why I've been working on the upcoming csound package for R, which connects to Csound computer synthesis software to make any sound imaginable. Your computer'll be the hippest sample space on the randomized […]

## Howling Winds and Stochastic Tones

March 9, 2011

0

My greatest pleasures in mathematics come from observing--and here, listening to--the interplay of simple and complex. With a few axioms and definitions you can create surprising worlds, and in what seems like a mess you can find beautiful regularities. It's damn sexy, frankly. Here, I use a simple recursive equation to directly generate my sounds […]

## Rhythms of Equality and Inequality

February 6, 2011

4

Today I unveil my very first statistical YouTube video! I will do anything to keep you statisfied, and if that means YouTube, then so be it. But first, some exposition: In Panama, 10 percent of the population owned 45 percent of the income in 2000, whereas the bottom 10 percent owned only 0.6 percent. How […]

## Listening for trends in US baby names over 130 years

January 25, 2011

11

What happens when you mash together R's data crunching magic, Festival's speech synthesis power, and the audio wonders of the venerable music language Csound? You fall even more in love with free and open-source software, and you start hearing sounds like this: A single beat of the above sound represents the top 1000 baby names […]

## Dial-a-statistic! Featuring R and Estonia

January 16, 2011

2

Did you wake up this morning hoping that you would be able to listen to telephone beeps inspired by Estonian web site metrics? I knew you did! First things first: I came up with the slightly crazy idea of using the bleepy sounds that telephones make, called "dual-tone multifrequency" (DTMF) tones, as a tool in […]