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201313Jul10:33

A Song of Our Warm­ing Planet

Infor­ma­tion
pub­lished 13 July 2013 | mod­i­fied 30 May 2014
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When faced with the chal­lenge of shar­ing the lat­est cli­mate change dis­cov­er­ies, sci­en­tists often rely on data graph­ics and tech­ni­cal illus­tra­tions. Uni­ver­sity of Min­nesota under­grad Daniel Craw­ford came up with a com­pletely dif­fer­ent approach. He’s using his cello to com­mu­ni­cate the lat­est cli­mate sci­ence through music, accord­ing to ensia writer Todd Reubold.

warming planet music scoreTher­mome­ter mea­sure­ments show the aver­age global tem­per­a­ture has risen about 1.4 °F (0.8 °C) since 1880. Typ­i­cally, this warm­ing is illus­trated visu­ally with line plots or maps show­ing year-​by-​year changes in annual tem­per­a­tures. As an alter­na­tive, Craw­ford used an approach called data soni­fi­ca­tion to con­vert global tem­per­a­ture records into a series of musi­cal notes.

The final result, “A Song of Our Warm­ing Planet,” came about fol­low­ing a con­ver­sa­tion Craw­ford had with geog­ra­phy pro­fes­sor Scott St. George dur­ing an intern­ship. St. George asked Craw­ford about the pos­si­bil­ity of turn­ing a set of data into music.

“Data visu­al­i­sa­tions are effec­tive for some peo­ple, but they aren’t the best way to reach every­one,” says St. George. “Instead of giv­ing peo­ple some­thing to look at, Dan’s per­for­mance gives them some­thing they can feel.”

Cli­mate sci­en­tists have a stan­dard tool­box to com­mu­ni­cate their data. We’re try­ing to add another tool to that tool­box, another way to com­mu­ni­cate these ideas to peo­ple who might get more out of music than maps, graphs and numbers.
Daniel Craw­ford, musician »

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 (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 195180 base line. Low notes rep­re­sent rel­a­tively cool years, while high notes sig­nify rel­a­tively warm ones.

The result is a haunt­ing sequence that traces the warm­ing of our planet year by year since the late 19th cen­tury. Dur­ing a run of cold years between the late 1800s and early 20th cen­tury, the cello is pushed towards the lower limit of its range. The piece moves into the mid-​register to track the mod­est warm­ing that occurred dur­ing the 1940s. As the sequence approaches the present, the cello reaches higher and higher notes, reflect­ing the string of warm years in the 1990s and 2000s.

Craw­ford hopes other researchers and artists will use or adapt his pdfcom­po­si­tion to sup­port sci­ence out­reach, and has released the score and sound files under a Cre­ative Com­mons license.

The video ends with a stark message:

Sci­en­tists pre­dict the planet will warm by another 1.8°C (3.2°F) by the end of this cen­tury. This addi­tional warm­ing would pro­duce a series of notes beyond the range of human hearing.

(Source: ensiaTodd Reubold, 28.06.2013)

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