Caudal Data Art

Caudal is an instrument that plays and draws data tables. Open an Excel file, a CSV or a Google Sheet, or connect an online source that updates itself, and the table starts to sound and to be drawn at the same time. Each row is a step. Each of the four voices picks one column for pitch, another for force and another for brightness. What you hear and what you see come from the same number. DATA • Excel (.xlsx), CSV, JSON and ARFF, or cells pasted from your spreadsheet. • Google Sheets by their link. • Live sources that read themselves again: today's earthquakes, the weather, air quality and waves. • The weather or air quality of any city, with search. • A library of public tables by topic: the Earth, climate, money, life. • Filter, sort and choose the part of the table that plays. SOUND • Four voices with twelve waveforms; one of them takes the shape of your own data. • Notes fitted to a scale, a line that follows the data, or a bass. • Fourteen factory sounds, from clean to wild. • Character: saturation, crackle, impacts, trance, grains and bursts. • Effects: filter, resonance, swirl, chorus, echo and a room that can be frozen. • More than two speakers: the voices spread around the room or going around it. DRAWING • Twenty-four shapes that move with what you hear: orbits, rivers, maps, a globe, trees, fireworks, mandalas, a black hole, a loom. • The columns that don't play are visible too, and move the color and the size. • Factory palettes, your own colors or random ones. • Glow, mirror, zoom, spin and a life of their own. • The drawing alone, full screen or on a second display, for a video wall or an installation. SAVE • The image as a PNG and prints for A3 or square formats, with title, source and date. • The sound of a pass as a WAV and the video as an MP4. • Setups: the data and all the settings, saved under a name. MIDI • The knobs of a controller move the controls, endless knobs included. • A program change loads a sound or a setup; a note changes the root. FREE AND FULL VERSION Caudal is free with the library tables, the live sources and eight shapes. The full version, a one-time in-app purchase that covers Mac and iPad, plays and draws your own data (files, pasted cells, links and Google Sheets) and opens all twenty-four shapes. Without it, saved images and videos carry a QR code to the Caudal website. For Mac and iPad. It collects no data. Live sources need an internet connection.