Back in 2024, dataviz guru Andy Kirk approached us with an exciting idea. He was creating a new digital edition of his classic project The Seinfeld Chronicles – an enormous deep dive into the TV show Seinfeld, and a genuine labour of love. Would it be possible to add some kind of sound to it, too? We had free rein to explore. What a dream.
Two years and lots of work later, the site is finally finished. It’s a thing of beauty – with a fresh design by Andy and developer Anne-Marie Dufour. It’s newly interactive, enhanced with sound and video, and somehow even more epically massive than before.
Andy wanted to capture the musical qualities of Seinfeld – the exquisite plot pacing and comic timing, the rhythm of the laughs, yada yada yada. So he asked us to sound-design the whole site, adding playful audio effects like the slap bass theme that plays in sync with the title bars as they animate in – one for each of the show’s nine seasons.
But the biggest (and most fun) part of the project was this: we used Andy’s painstakingly hand-collected data to build a data-to-music engine for every one of the 176 original episodes.
The music takes its cue from the Seinfeld theme tune. Each character gets their own instrumental part: the iconic slap bass for Jerry, jazzy keyboard harmonies for Elaine, wonky saxophone for George, and suitably chaotic horn stabs for Kramer. Other character types (friends, romantic partners, and so on) get percussion of various flavours. There are three versions of each character clip, from mild to wild, depending on how many laughs the character was pulling from the audience in that scene.
Every type of location has its own sound too: the diner is represented by a dropped coffee cup, the home of a character is Jerry’s door buzzer, and so on. Serenity now!
We then layered everything scene by scene to create 176 unique music tracks, one for each episode. Pick one, scroll through, and listen to the rhythm and interplay between different characters and locations.
How we made it
We composed 54 original four-bar music clips in Logic Pro, testing to make sure they all sounded good together. Together with the eight location samples and a few extras thrown in, that made a total of 66 sound clips. If a character or location was present in each scene, the corresponding clip gets played. A simple system, but with endlessly varying results. (Ok, maybe not endless: if you want to calculate how many possible clip combinations there are, get in touch!)
The sound world draws on the Seinfeld theme tune by Jonathan Wolff, which varied the musical details in every episode. We kept the core elements – that barking slap bass, the finger clicks and mouth pops, the hi-hat beat – and added many original elements of our own, using retro, low-end MIDI instruments to keep the early-90s feel.
We love to work on quirky, one-off creative projects like this that don’t fit a neat brief. If you're wondering whether sound – data-driven or otherwise – could elevate your project, drop us a message. We're always happy to explore.