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What Does Climate Change Sound Like As Music?

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Climate change research can be daunting and depressing. To properly engage with it takes time, and short catchphrases, like “the Earth is warming” don’t tell the full story of what’s going on. How can climate researchers convey the urgency and importance of their message? Some of them have turned to music.

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In a new, ten-minute Polish documentary produced for ClientEarth, composers Szymon Weiss and Szymon Sutor describe how they reinterpreted Vivaldi’s Four Seasons to convey the effects of climate change. Their piece, “The Lost Seasons”, uses musical composition to represent how the musicians perceive climate change to affect “a change of seasons from four to five, or maybe to three, maybe to a chaos of seasons.” The work was first presented at the 2018 United Nations Climate Change Conference COP24 in Katowice, Poland, last December.

While “The Lost Seasons” is an artistic interpretation of climate research data, others have taken a much more direct approach. In 2013, Daniel Crawford, of the University of Minnesota, turned 130 years of climate data into a cello piece. Two years later, he created a new piece for string quartet, where each instrument performs temperature data from a certain part of the Northern hemisphere.

More recently, Judy Twedt shared with TEDxSeattle how she took 36 years of measurements on Arctic Sea Ice levels and turned them into a piano piece. In this piece, the left hand plays a constant repetition of four chords, representing the seasons, while the right hand plays a note representative of the level of sea ice in a given month. Higher notes mean more ice cover, lower notes represent less ice.

There are also several ongoing collaborative projects that regularly perform music based on climate change research. In the UK, filmmakers Leah Borromeo and Katherine Round worked with composer Jamie Perera - and with scientists, journalists and others - to create “Climate Symphony” out of scientific data. Another collaboration, The Climate Music Project, based in San Francisco, has been working with different groups to create musical works inspired by climate science data. Their most recent piece, “Climate”, incorporates both historic data and models of potential future scenarios.

How effective is this type of communication? Twedt was inspired to turn data into music after she noticed the undergraduate students she was teaching about climate change started suffering from information overload after seeing so many different visual representations of the data. In her TEDxSeattle talk, Twedt says, “Music can be intimate, even vulnerable,  and help us understand, through rhythm and vibration, that climate change isn't simply a test problem, or a policy problem. It’s also an experience of loss -- and disruption.”

Meanwhile, “The Lost Seasons” composers hope that their composition will encourage listeners to learn more about the message of the work. “If someone is sentimentally impressed immediately after the concert, they will want to return to this material in result,” they shared in the ClientEarth documentary.

Sometimes the same attention-grabbing effect is achieved even by just turning climate data into sound that isn’t very musical at all. Last year, Chris Chafe of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford converted temperature and CO2 data collected by researchers at the University of Berkeley into sound. It’s not what you would normally describe as music. The sound starts as a low drone in the middle ages, and suddenly shoots up in pitch in the very last seconds of the audio, representing the rapid changes in the last few decades. In an interview with radio station KQED, researcher Valeri Vasquez, who contributed to the research,  said "The whole concept that we’re trying to explain here is not a pleasant one, it’s actually a frightening one, so it might be really appropriate that it ends in this kind of ambulance sound."

Making connections with an audience isn’t the only reason to turn scientific data into sound. Sometimes, the process of “sonification” - converting data to sound - can help researchers identify certain small changes or disruptions in a pattern in a way that are less obvious with visual representations. A classic example of sonification is the Geiger counter, with which you can hear whether you’re getting closer to a radioactive source. Sonification of data has also helped researchers discover new astronomical features, and the method is used in climate research as well. Researchers are using seismic recordings of the shifting of an ice shelf in Antarctica to monitor its condition. When sped up, these vibrations turn into audible sounds in which you can clearly hear changes corresponding to warmer periods.

Whether it’s for data analysis or education, listening to climate change data as sound tends to convey a sense of dissonance and urgency. It’s not always pleasant to listen to, but that’s exactly the point. WIth Earth Day coming up, these compositions are worth a listen.