Transforming Realtime Air Quality and Asteroid Data into MIDI – TouchDesigner + Ableton Live

Through the use of Ambee’s + NASA’s APIs and TouchDesigner, I’ve managed to capture air quality and near-earth space object [asteroids and fireballs] data in real-time, and used it to trigger MIDI signals in Ableton Live. Said signals are feeding two stock samplers and an instance of SketchCassette. Samplers are loaded one with Thom Yorke’s vocal stems from Nude and Reckoning, and the other one with the song that single-handedly introduced me to guitar-playing. Can you guess what song is that?

Data goes as follows:
–
Near-Earth space object data to stock samplers =
total-radiated-energy → C1 to B1
impact-energy → C1 to B1, C2 to B2 and C3 to B3
latitude → C2 to B2
longitude → C1 to B1 and C3 to B3
–
Air quality data to SketchCassette =
CO → tape_wow_depth and tape_dropout_intensity
NO2 → tape_flutter_depth
PM10 → tape_dropout_width
PM25 → tape_dropout_depth
SO2 → tape_age
AQI → tape_saturation
–

PS: To my surprise, I’ve found it bizarrely difficult to find clean and unified data on what are the least and most polluted cities around the world. For example, though some real-time AQI apps marked some cities in USA as “hazardous”, this API returned “healthy” real-time values.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a lot of marketing and politics around the subject. I hope this changes in the near-future.

You can access these and many more project files in my Patreon page: https://linktr.ee/uisato

#touchdesigner #abletonlive #data