A team of scientists recorded the excruciating sounds of glaciers melting. Different artists sampled them and transformed them into songs.
Climate change’s chilling melody
Scientific communication has been extensively debated. Sometimes problems arise, as it is not always easy to talk about technical topics in a simple and accurate way, without generalising. Climate change is one of these topics. Accurate dissemination of scientific knowledge on that topic, using graphs to compare information, is often too technical and complex to be employed.
Scientific communication has been extensively debated. Sometimes problems arise, as it is not always easy to talk about technical topics in a simple and accurate way, without generalising. Climate change is one of these topics. Accurate dissemination of scientific knowledge on that topic, using graphs to compare information, is often too technical and complex to be employed.
However, Daniel Crawford, a student at the University of Minnesota, tried a completely different approach. In 2013, while facing the challenge of sharing the latest findings on climate change, he converted the graph showing the annual variations of the global mean temperature into a series of musical notes, through a method called data sonification.
This method resulted in the melody of A song of our warming planet, a song where every note represents a year, the musical period represents a period of 20 years and the intensity of a note represents the temperature (low notes portray the coldest years, while high notes portray the warmest years).
[vimeo url=”https://vimeo.com/69122809″]
The project was created following a conversation between Daniel Crawford and his geography professor, Scott St George who stressed that:
Data visualizations are effective for some people, but they aren’t the best way to reach everyone. Instead of giving people something to look at, Dan’s performance gives them something they can feel.
A few weeks ago, Crawford resumed the project to write a new and more complex piece of music: Planetary bands, warming world.
By analysing and reinterpreting musically the data provided by NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies coming from different regions at different latitudes, this time Dan used a string quartet, where every instrument represented a different region of the world. The data collected were converted in notes covering three octaves. The coldest temperature is represented by the lowest note and it gets higher every 0.5° C temperature increase. As explained by Crawford in the video:
The cello matches the temperature of the equatorial zone. The viola tracks the mid latitudes. The two violins separately follow temperatures in the high latitudes and in the arctic
[vimeo url=”https://vimeo.com/127083533″]
Professor St. George noted that:
Listening to the violin climb almost the entire range of the instrument is incredibly effective at illustrating the magnitude of change — particularly in the Arctic which has warmed more than any other part of the planet.
Daniels added that:
If weather climate predictions for the future are correct, just using the scale I’ve created for my instrument, the resulting notes would be out of the range of human hearing,
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Since 2009 Karen Aplin is a researcher in the Physics division at Oxford University. Before getting to manage the teaching laboratories of this renowned English university, Karen obtained a doctorate degree in atmospheric physics at the Department of Meteorology at the University of Reading, but also a diploma in music performance from Trinity College, London. Metheorology
The United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21) will be held in Paris from 30 November to 11 December in Paris. It will represent an important opportunity for international debate, aiming to establish agreements between countries to limit and reduce CO2 emissions in the atmosphere and fight climate change (for further information read: What is COP21 and why it is
In 2007, Al Gore,Vice President of the United States at the time, organised the Live Earth concert on 7 July. In the same year, Al Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize together with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for their efforts in spreading awareness on climate change. On 21 January 2015, at the World Economic Forum in