Pop music producers work hard to make songs as bland and unchallenging as possible.
Programmers spend a lot of time boiling down, filtering and making data dull enough for management.
It doesn't have to be that way. Whether you're averaging out website hits into graphs, analysing logs or munging survey results, it doesn't feel like an entirely creative process. You're making dirty data clean by filtering out any quirkiness that could make decision makers nervous. The first time I started thinking about data beautifying was when a good friend of mine came up with an interesting idea. Emails into music, weird.