War vs Life

Collaborative sound Project

War VS Life

James, Tahir, Ellen

INDEX

SONIFICATION

OUR PROJECT

TARGET AUDIENCE

PROJECT REASONING

PESENTING

PROJECT GOALS

FEEDBACK

PURPOSE OF PROJECT

SETBACKS

METHODOLOGY

TEAM

FUTURE USES

TIMELINE

CONCLUSION

DATA COLLECTION

REFERENCES

DATA USAGE

"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a socialist.Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out - because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out - because I was not a jew. Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak for me."

Martin Neimoller

Our Project

For our project we are creating a sonification based on data collected from civilian casualties in war.We want to see if the impact of the Geneva convention the European Convention For Human Rights (ECHR) and the formulation of the United Nations (UN) has any significant impact on reducing civilian casualties.

Project reasoning

We chose this project to illustrate that regardless of how many humanitarian agencies have been set up, civilian casualties are always present in war zones. So are these agencies that have been put in place effective in reducing casualties and protection of civilians?

Project Goals

• A data sonification that will inform and educate through sound highlighting civilian casualties from selective wars from WW2 to present day
• We hope the data shows some effectiveness in the formulation of the ECHR geneva convention and UN
• We want audience to understand the importance of these agencies
• We aim to cohesively collaborate as a team to produce a clear and concise sonification and visualisation of civilian casualties in war
• Improve individual knowledge of sonfication, data collection and manipulation

Purpose of project

We aim to generate a greater understanding of the need to protect innocents from genocide, Questioning who is trying to protect us and how effective are they? We are trying to prove that massive loss of life at the hands of the rigue state that was nazi germany lead to the echr and other agencies being set up, and we want to measure how effective these agencies are by using data from later wars. So when we say “never again” what is the limit of never again? What does it take to bring peace keeping forces into a conflict and do they keep the peace? How many civilians have to be at risk before action is taken?

methodology

• Research and collect data of civilian casualties
• Review data to discover possible sonfications that will keep the datas integrity without creating bias
• Review and research sonification tools to discover the best tools for our project
• Collate various photographs relating to each war being covered in the sonification to further impact on understanding and severity of project topic
• Create a environmental piece in which our sonfication and photographs function together to display our work to an audience
• Gather audience feedback to gauge the success of project

Team

Ellen

James

Tahir

Special skills : Bossing people around

Special skills : Coding

Special skills : Politics

Computing : 10Data Collection : 9 Data manipulation : 8 Project management : 5 Artistic vision : 7 Musicality : 10 Teamwork : 10

Computing : 7Data Collection : 7 Data manipulation : 6 Project management : 10 Artistic vision : 11 Musicality : 9 Teamwork : 10

Computing : 6Data Collection : 8 Data manipulation : 9 Project management : 9 Artistic vision : 10 Musicality : 9 Teamwork : 10

Presentation

15th March 2024

Timeline

Present our group project idea and plan

Collect data and images

Feb 2024 - Mar 25th 2024

Collect data for our sonification and images for our slideshow

Explore sonification and data maipulation

Mar 25th 2024 - April 7th 2024

finding tools to sonify our data with and manipulating our data to correlate

Create sonification and slideshow

April 7th 2024 - 24th 2024

Put together our sonification and slideshow ready for showcasing

Project advertising

April 17th 2024 - 24th 2024

Advertise our project, spead the word to try maximise attendance

Project showcase

April 24th 2024

Showcase project to the public and gather feedback

Process feedback

April 24th - 1st May 2024

review our audience feedback from event

Writeup and vlog edit

1st May 2024 - 7th 2024

write up our findings and edit our vlog submission

Submission

10th May 2024

Iraq bodycount database

Data Collection

We are collecting our data from multiple verified sources on the internet including but not limited to Humanitarian agencies such as; amnesty international, red cross and the UN Refugee agency.We will organise our data by month from 1939 - present day, cataloguing civilian deaths across selected various wars

War Photo-graphy

Our world in data

Sources

Amnesty's annual report

Data useage

From the images collected for each war we will create a slideshow of those images from corresponding wars to play alongside our sonification, we aim to create an immersive multimedia experience for our audience that makes a statement and educates. There are similar sonifications available however the use of photographs is rare, we could not find any examples therefore our project will hopefully have a more meaningful impact on the audience.

The data will be sonified, through a csv (comma separated value) file, we will gather all our necessary data and compile it into a format that is uniform. We will use the monthly dates to create the time axis and the amount of casualties to create pitches, additional relevant data that we may find, such as casualties by bombing, starvation, unsanitary conditions and other repercussions/consequences of wars.

Sonification

Target audience

Our project is beneficial to everyone, we all have human rights that need protecting and this is something we intend to highlight therefore hoping to gather a range of participants including, students, teachers and any members of the general public.

Presenting

We will be using sound and visual aids to create sonic and visual installation. We aim to hold 3 timetabled screenings hopefully in Eldon Lecture theatre 1.11 or any large hall with projector and speakers we will also conduct a small spoken introduction and conclusion in person around screenings.

Feedback

We will create a questionnaire for both entrance and exit of our projects screening to gauge how successfully we have educated and informed participants, additionally gathering their feedback and views on our project.

• Entrance questionnaire will be short and multiple choice questions to gather initial understanding of our projects topic.
• Exit questionnaire will feature longer questions requiring some written responses about, how the screening has changed or furthered their knowledge and understanding of the importance of our human rights and who's protecting them.

Setbacks

• Not gathering the right data
• Not having enough metrics to sonfiy
• Having too much data and too little time

future uses

Our project has the potential to expand beyond our time at Portsmouth, by setting up a framework and foundation for others to be able to collect data in the same format and sonify all conflicts past, present and future. This project has the ability to reach and connect with a wider audience offering an insightful and impactful public information and education experience.

Conclusion

Our project is offering a public information education through forms of audio and visual media, it is especially relevant today with war and civilian casualties regularly occurring and in the current political climate we have elected officials campaigning for the UK to leave the ECHR and remove the human rights and protections of its citizens.

Thanks!

REFERENCES

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/research/2022/03/annual-report-202122/#globalstatistics

https://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/

https://aoav.org.uk/2022/18-images-that-helped-defined-modern-conflict/

References

Sonification of covid deaths Sonification - Every UK Covid 19 Death by Day - from March 5th 2020 to June 23rd 2020. (n.d.). Soundcloud.com. Retrieved March 13, 2024, from https://soundcloud.com/jamieperera/sonification-every-uk-covid-19-death-by-day ‌Sonifiaction tools cirlabs/miditime. (2024, February 22). GitHub. https://github.com/cirlabs/miditime ‌Astronify. (n.d.). Astronify.readthedocs.io. https://astronify.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ ‌Sonification Tools. (n.d.). Loud Numbers. Retrieved March 13, 2024, from https://www.loudnumbers.net/tools ‌TwoTone. (n.d.). Twotone-Midiout-Beta.netlify.app. Retrieved March 13, 2024, from https://twotone-midiout-beta.netlify.app/ ‌StarSound. (n.d.). Jeffreyhannam. Retrieved March 13, 2024, from https://www.jeffreyhannam.com/starsound ‌Humanitarian agencies European Court of Human Rights. (1950). European Convention on Human Rights. https://www.echr.coe.int/documents/d/echr/Convention_ENG United Nations. (n.d.). History of the United Nations. United Nations; United Nations. https://www.un.org/en/about-us/history-of-the-un History.com Editors. (2018, August 21). Geneva Convention. HISTORY; A&E Television Networks. https://www.history.com/topics/world-war- ii/geneva-convention

https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace#all-charts