Temporary Relief
From Monday, October 29th, to Friday, November 2nd, I tracked how many times I cracked my neck, back, wrists, fingers, and toes. Inspired by Week Seven in Dear Data, I decided that I wanted to compose a piece of music for my data visualization. Therefore, I averaged out the number of times I cracked each specific part of my body across these five days. Here’s what I found:
- 25 neck cracks
- 9 back cracks
- 4 wrist cracks
- 106 finger cracks
- 41 toe cracks
Using these numbers, I realized that in a typical day, I’d crack these parts around this many times. Before actually composing my musical piece, I created a key. First, I knew that I wanted my piece to sound as if the cracks were moving from the top of the body to the bottom of the body. Therefore, I decided on neck cracks being the highest note you hear in the piece (because it is at the top of the body), and toe cracks to be the lowest note (because toes are at the bottom of the body). Next, I assigned each body part with a specific note. Deciding to compose my piece in C major, I based my note decisions on the C major arpeggio. Therefore, my toes would be the note E; my fingers would be the note G; my wrists would be the note C; my back would be the note E; and my neck would be a high G.
Next was time to decide which type of notes each body part would represent. I ultimately decided to match the quickeness of the crack/the time betweeen each crack to the note length. Therefore, I assigned as follows:
- Neck - quarter note
- Back - half note
- Wrist - whole note
- Fingers - sixteenth notes
- Toes - half notes
After my planning was officially over, I created a sample staff to act as the key (also shown below). This staff showed where each note would be (the pitch), what it would look like (type of note), and which body part it represented.
AND FINALLY, THE MOMENT YOU’VE BEEN WAITING FOR…HERE IS THE COMPOSITION (also shown below)! If you’d prefer to take a listen, click here.
Please note that the notes played should instead have a short, sharply detached sound (to mimic the popping sound) as opposed to the long notes heard in the audio clip
So what did I learn? For one, I realized that I crack my knuckles way more times than I ever would’ve guessed. When looking at each specific day’s data, I did notice that I cracked the most on Monday and Thursday. From this, I noticed that I cracked more when I got less sleep the night before (after comparing this data to my sleep data collected from my phone). Futhermore, my busiest and most stressful day of class had the least amount of cracks. This signals to me that my cracks may not result from stress.
When deciding to represent my data in this way, I knew I wanted the audio to replicate how it may sound if we were able to pop our knuckles and other body parts back-to-back without stopping. In the moment, it seemed as if I didn’t crack my bones as much as I did simply because it was spread across 24 hours. However, in this composition, it spans only 55 seconds. I believe that while this data being portrayed in a spreadsheet still would’ve proven to be a shock, it wouldn’t have caused people to image someone cracking parts of their body, without stopping, for almost a minute straight. In addition, I feel that my modes of representation allow people that may struggle with reading data/spreadsheets to listen instead.
As I am looking for a chiropractor (for back pain) in the Boston area, I am planning to show him or her this data. I feel that while this data was interesting to me to collect and visualize, it’ll be helpful for my health as well. Hopefully, there are no extremely detrimental effects of around 185 cracks a day! Ultimately, this data not only allowed me to recognize my habits but will help me verbalize and clearly show them to medical professionals when seeking advice.