data sonification, bureaucratic documents, archival practice
Take a Number is a backround music for a bureaucratic opera, a sound-based research project that weaves together data sonification, urban ecology, and intimate narrative. Its musical structure emerges from bureaucratic documents—specifically deregistration forms for temporary residence—filled out in the name of four butterfly populations that have gone locally extinct on the Ljubljana Marshes. These forms are translated into UTF-8 character strings and numerical sequences that shape the opera’s rhythmic and melodic patterns, turning an ordinarily silent administrative record into a musical framework. Each extinct butterfly species becomes a soloist, its identification number, former habitat, and date of erasure transformed into sonic textures that evoke the tension between ecological loss and bureaucratic procedure. A libretto composed of online conversations, forum posts, personal testimonies, and official language centers on three “ghosts” of time who speak about leaving the city, intertwined with voices of a landlord and a person facing eviction. Through themes of breakup, displacement, and the collapse of home, the opera draws a parallel between gentrification and environmental disappearance: as butterflies lose habitat, residents lose housing, and the city loses its own body.