1,776. That’s how many hours I lost to chronic migraines (being in pain or recovering from it) from January to May of 2021. That’s 74 out of 151 days, or 2 months and 13 days, or 49% of the time. 

What are the factors that contrubute to this confiscation of time? In my experience, it is the combination of pain, emotion, and sound sensitivites that slow my perception of time, leaving my life in a state of pause.

Perhaps we can think of this experience in a “big idea to specific idea” approach, like this: 

After analyzing five months of my migraine data, here are some of my findings. (arranged in a similar top-down approach - starting from all 5 months together and then taking a closer look at the month of January.) 

Using the same data as above, I have translated the variables from the month of January into a sonification. I did this by importing my data into TwoTone, recording the midi notes into Ableton, and then assigning sounds, velocity, and pitch to the variables below.

Watching this sonification video 11,011 times in a row would be equivalent to the total hours I lost to migraines in January.

During the creation of this project, I had 13 total migraines, (10 in June, 1 in July, and 2 in August) effectively losing 198 hours of time or 8.25 total days.