Hi everyone. I discovered Sonic Pi while I was looking for something to sonify some climate data, and over about a week have discovered so much, and uncovered a heap of questions. I have been able to stubbornly muddle my way through (that’s how I do things), but there is a small list that I might bring here at some stage. I am neither a musician nor an adept coder but hey, I love a challenge.
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Hi! Welcome!
How did you managed to sonify your data? Scraping data from a source and sent it through OSC to Sonic-Pi? It would be really interesting to see what you found so far. I can see some ways to do that and I think that this is something that nobody did before with Sonic-Pi. Great!
Hi Bubo, and thanks for the welcome. I saw OSC as a possibility but my expertise isn’t up to that yet. I’ve just been grabbing data from a spreadsheet. I use a spreadsheet to convert raw data into a range of midi note numbers and then manually manipulate it into sonic pi code. With twenty years of daily data I had to overcome the buffer limits and now code into an external file for the big datasets, while I play with sounds using a fragment of that data.
I will have another look at OSC, it could save me a lot of time. I would love to hear your thoughts on other options. I’m more than happy to share what I have done so far, not sure where the best place is to do that yet . 
In the future I’d like to head towards an audiovisual installation that allows a person to interact with the data to influence both the sounds produced and the visual component as well.
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Nice! Yes, I think that the best option for you would be to script something that send some parts of the dataset in an OSC message and convert it into parameters / notes directly in Sonic-Pi. This way, you wouldn’t have to prepare anything manually once the system is ready. Just throw data and turn it into music. You wouldn’t have to store your dataset into the Sonic-Pi text buffer too.
OSC is really easy to use, just look at the documentation included in the application. In 5 minutes or so, you’ll be ready to use it. There is some really easy ways to send OSC from various scripting languages, Python being the most obvious (and powerful) one.
Hello from Perth @SoniPhilE 
Welcome.
Sounds like a fun project. I’ve hardly used the OSC functions myself (despite being on the core development team! 
)
If you do decide to go down that path, there are probably plenty of people (myself included) that would be happy to answer any questions you have.
As far as sharing what you have, http://in-thread.sonic-pi.net/c/creations-and-ideas is an ideal place to start - look forward to reading about it if you feel like talking more about it
Thanks Ethan (I presume), and Bubo. I’m going to jump right in. I’m a bit stubborn about this sort of thing and tend to hang on until I’ve got it sorted. As you suggested I did put a post into creations and ideas along with some of my current code. I checked out some of the other stuff in there and it is so inspirational, some really beautiful bits of work. I read a few posts and looked at a bit of others peoples code and that was a bit daunting, but I do need to remember that what I want to do at the moment is to represent the weather data through sound and try to avoid heading off on tangents, regardless of how interesting they may be.
Ah but the great thing is that nothing says you can’t explore those tangents later! 