EXHIBITION & INSTALLATION
The European Press Orchestra: A Symphony of Dysharmonia
Interactive Sound & Data Installation by SoniFriday
How can truth be told on broken instruments?
Imagine you sit down at a piano to play your favorite song. But when you start hitting the keys, it all sounds disharmonic and weird - you realize that the instrument is out of tune and some keys are even missing.
The European Press Orchestra tells the story of the growing threat to those who are dedicated to revealing lies and giving truth a voice. Over the past ten years in European countries, press freedom has declined, and media plurality is increasingly at risk. The European Press Orchestra is an interactive sound installation that turns press freedom and media plurality data across Europe into music.
This generative Symphony of Dysharmonia is based on two key datasets: the World Press Freedom Index by Reporters without Borders and the Media Pluralism Monitor. It includes over 40 countries - EU-members, candidate states, and neighbours - and their state of press freedom and media plurality.
Each country plays an instrument within the European Press Orchestra - but the sound of its instrument is shaped by data. The lower the Press Freedom Index, the more detuned and broken the instrument sounds. Meanwhile, the Media Pluralism Monitor defines the rhythmic complexity and note range of the melody: a pluralistic media landscape results in lively rhythms and a wide range of notes; less plurality results in sparse note patterns.
Between 2015 and 2025, 88 journalists even lost their lives in Europe. The Committee to Protect Journalists documents each of these deaths in their database. In the European Press Orchestra, their absence is made audible: every killed journalist is represented by a hammering drumbeat—echoing as a reminder that they must not be forgotten.
The rhythmic patterns are drawn from real TV news opener themes from across Europe. These patterns were extracted, simplified, and mapped to the Media Pluralism data of each country.
All of this is based on a pentatonic D minor scale – in reference to Beethoven's 9th Symphony, on which the official EU anthem is based. Instead of celebrating fundamental democratic values of the European Union, this piece reflects its fragility.
The European Press Orchestra: A Symphony of Disharmonia was created in 2025 by the data-and-sound collective SoniFriday using algorithmic composition and data sonification methods.
More information on method & data: https://dysharmonia-info.datasonifyer.de/
