Two great examples of turning data into sound and music: Interest Rates: The Musical (“70 years of interest rates ups and downs, with one month represented by one beat, and quarter-point changes given by semitones”) and Planetary Bands, Warming World, composed by Douglas Crawford (“The cello matches the temperature of the equatorial zone. The viola tracks the mid latitudes. The two violins separately follow temperatures in the high latitudes and in the arctic”).
Here’s “Interest Rates: The Musical.” If you don’t know what interest rates were like in the seventies, this will make it clear. And you won’t miss 2008.
And “Planetary Bands, Warming World.” Composer Daniel Crawford (an undergraduate at U Minnesota) worked with geography professor Scott St. George. Using an open climate change data set, Crawford turned surface temperate in the northern hemisphere into a composition for string quartet.