David Selby, a first Year PhD student in the Department of Statistics, has won first prize in the Anvil Hack II event.

Anvil Hack II is a 24-hour "creative" hackathon run by Major League Hacking, which also organised the WarwickHACK event hosted by the engineering department in February. Anvil Hack II was hosted by Goldsmiths, University of London on 7–8 May.

David formed a two-man team with Angus Scott, a friend from the University of Edinburgh. Rather than generate data from music, they set about generating music from data. Inspired by Leland Wilkinson's book The Grammar of Graphics, "Grammarphone" is a web application that maps values in data to the frequency and volume of music, allowing you to listen to your data.

Judging criteria for Anvil Hack II were "creativity" and "fun". There were also prizes from the event's various sponsors (e.g. a GitHub prize for best developer tool and an Amazon prize for best project using Amazon Web Services) as well as an overall first, second and third prize. Grammarphone came first and was awarded the Gold Anvil, which is a real (and very heavy!) anvil, painted gold, that they got to take home.

You can try out Grammarphone here. The interface lets you enter a dataset, which Grammarphone will simultaneously visualise with a line graph and "sonify" with an audio graph. You can pick your own artist and track, or the application can randomly select one from Spotify for you.