soundeR

Turn data into sound, the tidyverse way.

A chart turns numbers into shapes you can see. soundeR turns them into sounds you can hear: higher numbers become higher notes, the gap between two events becomes the silence between two notes, and a whole season becomes a short tune. It’s built for people learning data analysis in R. Give it a data frame, name a column, and print the result.

The luge finals at the 2026 Winter Olympics, one note per sled at the moment it crossed the line, after the New York Times’s 2010 “Fractions of a Second: An Olympic Musical.”

library(soundeR)

luge_finals |>
  sonify_data(time = behind, time_scale = 1, sequence = event, instrument = "piano")

Installation

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("mattwaite/soundeR")

For real instruments (piano, xylophone, cello and 125 more), run this once. It downloads about 30 MB of instrument sounds:

soundeR::sound_setup()

Without it, soundeR uses its own built-in sounds.

A season you can hear

husker_games holds every game of Nebraska men’s basketball’s 2025-26 season: 28-7, a 20-0 start, and the program’s first NCAA tournament wins. Map the point margin to pitch, so bigger wins are higher notes:

husker_games |>
  sonify_data(point_margin, instrument = "xylophone", bpm = 180)

In RStudio or Positron, printing a sonification opens an audio player in the Viewer pane. In Quarto and R Markdown documents, the player appears on the page. notes() shows the note each row became, and save_sound() saves it as .mp3, .wav or .mid.

Hearing a distribution

sonify_histogram() is a histogram for your ears: it sweeps across the bins from low to high, and the more rows in a bin, the higher the note. ne_house_years counts Nebraska’s single-family houses by the year they were built:

ne_house_years |>
  sonify_histogram(year_built, weight = houses, binwidth = 1, instrument = "marimba")

With one bin per year, you can hear old houses piling up on round-number years like 1900. With binwidth = 10, the spikes disappear and the shape of a century of building comes through.

See vignette("soundeR") for a full walkthrough, and vignette("distributions") for more on distributions.