I've been banging on about sonification long enough it's probably time I actually made something. Here's the first attempt.
In short - it's a little Max programme that takes a feed from a GrowGuard stuck in a plant pot and turns the moisture level in the pot into the ticking and tocking and binging and bonging of an old-fashioned clock.
If that makes no sense, here's a longer explanation.
GrowGuard is a splendid thing, a bit like a botanicalls, which monitors a plant and streams data into a cosm account. It reports on light level, temperature and moisture level and cosm turns these into nice graphs like this:
(As you'll see my GrowGuard is broken right now, new ones are on the way!)
Cosm also lets the data stream out and Guy Evans made a patch that takes the feed from Cosm and lets you play with it in Max.
I wanted something audible that reports the mosture level of the plant (because I can see the light and feel the temperature myself) but in the background, playing to secondary attention, and without too much urgency - it doesn't change that quickly. And I wanted something gradual - triggers and tweets are too abrupt and binary - I wanted to hear it sliding down and up, not being on or off. And, I definitely didn't want music, I wanted sound. There are too many pitfalls around music.
So, I've made it tick and tock like an old-fashioned clock and bing and bong on the hour. The tick and the bing always play at the same pitch but the tock and the bong play at dfferent pitches representing the current relationship between the cosm feed and a target number you set for it. So the relationship between tick and tock and bing and bong tells you the wetness or dryness of the soil. So, at any time you can listen for the tick/tock and tell what's going on, and, every hour, you get a slightly more intrusive alert. Slightly. That's the idea anyway.
If you'd like to try it out, you'll need Max Runtime installed, which is free from here (there's a link at the top right of the page). Then you can download the patch (it's called tickosm.mxf) It probably only works on a Mac though. Then you need something feeding data out of cosm - you can set up a twitter account to do that if you've got nothing else. Then you just stick the relevant feed/API details in the boxes at the bottom.
Notes
This is the first bit of software I've ever made so it probably won't work. Guy's original patch contains a little bit of javascript I'm powerless to understand, but, which I imagine, might let this work with other sources of data. And, when I work out how, I'll stick the original patch on GitHub so if anyone fancies improving it, they can.
The patch is a thing Max calls a 'collective' - I think that means it'll only work on a Mac. I've also tried to make it into an 'application' which should, I believe, be cross-platform. But I couldn't get that to work. I'll keep trying.