Caudal Data Art

Generative art from your data, no code needed: the climate since 1850, today's earthquakes or your own spreadsheet, turned into music and image at once.

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. • Fifteen factory sounds, from clean to wild. • Percussion drawn from your data: kick, snare and cymbals, with no samples. • 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 • Thirty-two 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. • MIDI out: the voices and the percussion play other synths or go into your DAW. • Ableton Link: the same tempo as Live and the other apps on your network.

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 thirty-two 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.