What better way to say ‘Happy Canada Day’ than to highlight a data sonfication project from HotPopRobot. These are not all of the awards won by the HotPopRobot team (based in Toronto, Canada), from the hotpoprobot.com homepage,

1. Micro:bit Challenge North America Runners Up 2020.
2. NASA SpaceApps 2019, 2018, 2017, 2014.
3. Imagining the Skies 2019.
4. Jesse Ketchum Astronomy Award 2018. Hon.
5. Mention at 2019 NASA Planetary Defense Conference. Emerald Code Grand Prize 2018.
6. Canadian Space Apps 2017

Here’s more about this intriguing team from the site’s About Us page,

HotPopRobot is a maker-family enterprise co-founded in 2014 by Artash […], Arushi […], Rati, and Vikas to bring discussions on Science, Space Exploration, Astronomy, and Technology in our everyday conversation. It encourages families, kids, and youths to become creators (and not consumers), scientists, artists, or whatever they want to be by undertaking projects on space, robotics, coding, and science.

We started this enterprise after winning the NASA Space Apps Toronto 2014 Award for our Mars Rover: CuriousBot. We ended up among the top 5 NASA Space Apps Winners (people’s choice) globally! We won the NASA SpaceApps Challenge Toronto again in 2019, 2018, and 2017 as well as the Canadian Space Agency’s Space Apps Challenge 2017 for our project – “Yes I Can” which used RadarSat-2 satellite data to recreate the #Canada150 logo. We ended up getting invited to the Canadian Space Agency to present our project and meet the new Canadian Astronauts.

The latest project is a musical based on data sonification of data on COVID-19 impacts in Toronto, Canada. Here’s a video of the ‘Toronto COVID-19 Lockdown Musical’ or more formally the ‘Musical Scales Project’,

As of June 2020, Artash and Arushi are in grade eight and grade five, respectively, which means they are likely 13 and 10 years old now and were seven and four years old, respectively, when they and their parents started the HotPopRobots enterprise in 2014.

Definitely visit their website if you’re interested in artificial intelligence, robots, machine learning, as well as, their other topics.

Regarding their latest project, here’s more about the Musical Scales Project from a June 19 (?), 2020 posting on their website,

The beauty of the human mind is that once you set it free, it soars high. Our mind too was teeming with big questions that we wanted to find the answers about. Would the COVID19 lockdown have increased the bird density in the city skies, would the closure of all economic activities have affected the rotation of the Earth, would an Alien civilization be able to figure out that something drastic must have happened on Earth?

All questions are good questions. But from our previous experiences of making projects, we knew we had to limit our imagination for the time being and focus on practicality to come up with workable project design. Once we have made something and it works, we could always keep improving it or make newer versions of the same.

So between the two of us [Artash and Arushi], we limited our questions to:

1. Has the noise levels on our streets gone down?
2. Has the air we breathe become cleaner?
3. Have the traffic levels on our streets gone down?
4. Has the lockdown affected the vibration of the Earth due to the stopping of businesses, economic, and construction activities?

Here’s part of the description for how they set up the equipment (from their June 19 (?), 2020 posting),

We often have to dismantle some of our older projects to get the components for our newer projects. It is not a good feeling as we often use our older projects to give demonstrations at various public events. So where possible we try to make our projects modular so that we can use the same components for more than one project.

We ended up collecting the following sensors and cameras for this project.

1. Light Sensor:  It measures the light around us. It has a photo-resistor whose value decreases when light falls on it. It is the base sensor that will help us visualize separate daily data readings as well as changes in data collected during day and night.
2. Sound Sensor: To listen to street noise around us. It is similar to a microphone but gives analog values of sound levels. This raw data then has to be calibrated to understand how it changes with the change in sound levels.
3. PM 2.5 Dust Sensor: It is a sensor to measure particulate matters of 2.5 microns in the air. There is a small heater in the sensor which directs the flow of air in the sensor in an upward direction (convection current). The flow of air passes through infrared light which bounces around. The more the bounce the more the particulate matter or more polluted the air.
4. Temperature Sensor: We wanted to see how much the temperature was changing around us. The sensor is just like a digital thermometer but it prints out the readings.
5. Humidity Sensor: It measures how damp the air around is. We measure humidity and temperature as they both affect the pollution levels.
6. Intel RealSense Camera: To get a wide overview of the traffic on King Street. Its high resolution allows us to apply machine learning for object identification and tracking.

In addition to getting data from our sensors, we had to rely on external databases to get some other information.

1. Covid19 Infection Rates in Toronto: from City of Toronto Public Health website
2. The intensity of Night Lights Over Toronto: Using NASA Night Light Data to understand changes in night lights over Toronto during different weeks.
3. Seismic Vibrations in Toronto:  We got the displacement data of Earth along the vertical direction from the Leslie Spit Seismic Station in Toronto.

We used the free Musical Algorithm software (www.musicalgorithms.org) to bring all the data together and create the COVID19 Lockdown Musical.

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The descriptions and instructions are comprehensive, which is very helpful if you’re planning your own project.

Thank you to HotPopRobot. And, Happy Canada Day!