A Song of Our Warming Planet: Cellist Turns 130 Years of Climate Change Data into Music

If you use data graph­ics and tech­ni­cal illus­tra­tions to explain cli­mate change to most Amer­i­cans, their eyes will glaze over. So Uni­ver­si­ty of Min­neso­ta under­grad Daniel Craw­ford is try­ing a dif­fer­ent approach. He’s using music to com­mu­ni­cate the lat­est in cli­mate sci­ence. Draw­ing on a method called “data soni­fi­ca­tion” that con­verts glob­al tem­per­a­ture records into a series of musi­cal notes, Craw­ford and his trusty cel­lo have cre­at­ed “A Song of Our Warm­ing Plan­et.” Here’s some of the tech­ni­cal back­sto­ry you need to know:

Craw­ford based his com­po­si­tion on sur­face tem­per­a­ture data from NASA’s God­dard Insti­tute of Space Stud­ies. The tem­per­a­ture data were mapped over a range of three octaves, with the cold­est year on record (–0.47 °C in 1909) set to the low­est note on the cel­lo (open C). Each ascend­ing halftone is equal to rough­ly 0.03°C of plan­e­tary warm­ing.

In Crawford’s com­po­si­tion, each note rep­re­sents a year, ordered from 1880 to 2012. The pitch reflects the aver­age tem­per­a­ture of the plan­et rel­a­tive to the 1951–80 base line. Low notes rep­re­sent rel­a­tive­ly cool years, while high notes sig­ni­fy rel­a­tive­ly warm ones.

Craw­ford has released the score and sound files under a Cre­ative Com­mons license.

Down­load the sheet music (PDF) | Down­load the audio file (MP3) | Play the audio file only | Code to embed the audio file

To delve deep­er into what’s hap­pen­ing to our cli­mate, we sug­gest you spend time with Glob­al Warm­ing: a free course from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go.

via i09

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