In an effort to explore other methods of data visualization (or in this case data sonification), the goal of this project was to create a program that could turn University of Nebraska-Lincoln Police Department crime data into music, or at least sound.

The data was taken from the UNLPD Daily Crime and Fire Log, which contains data back to 2005. The program was written in Python, using Chris Groskopf’s agate library and a modified version of the Center for Investigative Reporting’s MIDITime library.

The program offers three main functions: allcrime_onemonth(), samecrime_twomonths() and onecrime_allmonths().

This will take all the crime events from a specified month and turn them into a MIDI file, with each crime in a separate track.

This will take two specified months, present the common crime types and create a MIDI file for a selected crime type with each month in a different track.

This will show the crime types present in the dataset and create a MIDI file for all instances of a selected crime type.