From the AGU EOS Blogs, amazing that one can get so worked up with feelings over a 0.7C global temperature difference.
The sounds and songs of climate data
My first formal introduction to the portrayal of climate data through music was at the 2013 ScienceOnline Climate conference, and I was most recently updated on various forms of art in STEM education at the AGU 2014 Fall Meeting session on Connecting Geoscience with the Arts. At ScienceOnline Climate, undergraduate student researcher Daniel Crawford (Univ. of Minnesota) took 130 years of the average surface global temperature data from NASA and translated it into music for the cello. The video below captures the story of this unique project and includes a performance of the piece “A Song of Our Warming Planet.”
A Song of Our Warming Planet from Ensia on Vimeo.
Mr. Crawford has continued working with his faculty mentor, geography professor Scott St. George, and has expanded his version of the climate conversation to not just over time but over latitudes. His newest piece, “Planetary Bands, Warming World,” is written for a string quartet and captures temperature changes across the globe. The video below explains this updated piece and includes a performance.
The sound of climate change from the Amazon to the Arctic from Ensia on Vimeo.
I have shared both of these videos with the students in my introductory-level Earth science courses. These videos are successful in capturing the attention of students (including non-science majors) and generating discussion. That students continue to mention these videos throughout the semester and share them with others outside of my course demonstrates to me how effective music can be to communicate climate data.
Another interesting “climate science meets music” project is the sonification of polar climate data, driven by City College of New York professors Marco Tedesco and Jonathan Perl. You can listen to an interview about Greenland Melt Music or visit the PolarSeeds – Sound website to listen to sonified daily and annual data. Unfortunately, I am unable to embed any of these soundtracks, but it is absolutely worth visiting the site to listen to the haunting sounds of the albedo choir.
If you are interested in additional climate music pieces, check out the New York Times article from 2013 titled “Fiddling While the World Warms.” In this piece, a digital violin plays 600 years of climate data – take a listen below.
More on this ‘music’ here: http://blogs.agu.org/geoedtrek/2015/05/27/climate-data-music/
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Shouldn’t there be a pause in the warmth of the music at the end?
Wow musical hockey sticks , amazing !
If you listen to the last video, there is a long high-pitched whine at the end. That presumably is the ‘pause’. That may also be an artistic comment on the shrill, ear-piercing whine of the alarmists.
Probably Mikey.
The “music” was adjusted until they got it juust right. Here is a lullaby for the alarmists to find comfort in:
4:33?
I mean, like, the “Hive Bozo” artsy-fartsy types are such opportunistic parasites. But anyway, the guy on the cello, if he wants to faithfully record the temperature record in music (what a barf-bag, geek-ball idea, in the first place!–so do any of these culture-vulture, good-comrade weirdos have a real life, or what?), then he really needs to employ portamenti to reflect the multiple, recurring adjustments to the temperature record–lots and lots of portamenti! Some trills might help too.
And if any of the lefty, brainwashed “dumb kids”, don’t know “jack” about portamenti, then they might Google: “Arthur Catterall Elgar Chanson de Nuit” to see how it’s done. (Notice that Catterall, like a number of his contemporaries (e. g. Sammons, Huberman, Spalding, Maud Powell, etc.) could actually draw tears from a grown man cry with his “art”. In contrast, today’s music-racket, bot-violinist, can’t-put-butts-in-seats, contest-winning hive-cogs, couldn’t move one to tears (not that they’d care to try–it would kill their “careers”, if they did), even if they whacked the listener, full-force, in the “nuts” with their Guarneri.)
artsy-fartsy types are such opportunistic parasites
Yes they certainly are. Actually most of the academics employed in the Humanities are parasites as well.
So, like, pondering this whole climate-music business, a little further, I’m wonderin’ if the idea might not be expanded to include follow-on renditions of the “Medieval Warm Period” and the “Roman Warm Period” and all those other warming episodes (might run out of cello with some of them), since the last Ice Age ended. It might then be of interest to play those various versions of “global warming”, in random order, and see if any of the brainwashed dumb-kids, that are the target of this latest, agit-prop hive-fad–“weaponized-tune-wanking”–can guess which is “now” and which the various “thens”.
We’ve had climate change music for some time now.
M4GW
Oops! seems my “link” to Catterall brings up “Chanson de Matin” not “Chanson de Nuit”. However, once you’re on the youtube site, perform a “youtube” search for “Arthur Catterall Elgar Chanson de Nuit. But both “Nuit” and “Matin” are worth a listen, I recommend.
And then, while at the youtube site, for the ultimate violin experience (along with Hassid’s Dvorak Humoresque, of course (also available on youtube)), search “Maud Powell Deep River”. Listen and then listen to the “climate change” cello-dude.
See what I mean?
Rock on, Mike! LOL!
What’s worst is that this guy will most likely get a tenure because of this work. (Barf)
Not when you’ve cherry-picked the end date…
Why is starting from the most recent record, cherry picking?
I won’t need mother natures help to put these “masterpieces” on pause.
I’ll take Vivaldi’s Four Seasons any day over this ‘music’, thank you.
Good one!
Seriously, wouldn’t the random chaotic sounds of wind chimes more correctly reflect a changing climate?
I just retired from my porch on a spring evening in Vermont. Throughout the yard we have hung the traditional wind bells of the harbors of Maine – Camden, Bar Harbor, Portland – these chimes were meant to inform sailors beset by fog of their locations. I’m uncertain of any design (there are good models for somethings) for their harmony, but with the wind, it is hauntingly lovely. Wind made music.
I suspect that we skeptics are actually nature lovers incensed with nature’s abuse.
Yes!
And it would be more beautiful:
Swiss cows (youtube)
…and pan over to clouds….. Got those clouds modeled accurately, with SKILL, yet, you AGWer scientists, er, modelers? lololololol
i.e., “random sounds of {COW} chimes.” 🙂
Hey, that Cow Bell Symphony sounds exactly like my Cow Bell Symphony recorded in the Pralognan Valley in France!
Given about 20 years of no global warming trend and all the other CAGW projections and assumptions that are falling apart, this is the song that comes to my mind when I think about the fate of the CAGW hypothesis:
LOL, Samurai — “The Dead March.” Perfect. AGW is sooooo OVER.
CO2 UP. WARMING STOPPED.
Finis.
Exactly.. what we see here are the last final gasps of air from these AGW proponents.
This “music” rather reminds me of this brilliant sketch.
All the right notes but not in the right order.
Or another great piano player.
James Bull
I remember wathing these live. Brilliant! Don’t see anything like this on TV anymore. Lew Dawson was great at dropping notes.
Do they have to change the song when the data gets revised?
I think you’ve got that backwards… the data will be revised to match the song… because models are infallible, while nature is not… the notes are hiding below the scale, but they’ll come out doubly so later.
Soon the sound of climate change could well be “Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow”.
Considering the pause, this piece seems the most appropriate:
Ooooohh ouch that was AWFUL. Perfect. One little “peep” or two and …. nothing.
Metaphor: Tiny % of total CO2 from human emissions yields……. NO WARMING. lololo
Good one!
Re: the opening quote, “Everything we do is music.” Lovely — IOW — NOTHING we do is music (eye roll). Another good metaphor, though: just as AGW is a bunch of NOTHING, purely windy conjecture.
The most amazing thing just happened…The video came to an end, I did not restart it, no sound came out — and I just KNEW that he was playing an encore!
Victor Borge could have made it interesting. E.g. close the cover on his fingers, pretend the stopwatch freezes in the last “movement,” take a catnap during another.
Victor Borge’s schtick was always great for some laughs, especially his “phonetic punctuation.”. Likewise, Peter Shickele’s PDQ Bach – especially his “1712 Overture.” – and even, going way back, Spike Jones.
Here’s “Professor” Shickele explaining PDQ Bach’s life to the Boston Pops audience, back when Williams was conductor.
and this
Wow, it just gets better and better. The ‘science’ is taking CAGW nowhere so now it truly has moved completely across to the humanities.
What was it that Voltaire said? If something is truly too stupid to be said then best put it in a song.
The mechanical, repetitive, mind-numbingly dull, style of those three pieces perfectly represents the junk science of AGW: it is as fingernails-on-chalkboard excruciating for a musician (me, I flatter myself) to listen to that “music” as it is for a uncorrupted, real scientist to listen to the garbage AGWers fling about and call “science.”
Just try this:
1. Listen to a bit of each of the above 3 pieces.
2. Listen to this:
“Le Cygne” (Saint Saens, performed by Yo Yo Ma) – youtube
Can you hear the difference in quality?
1st group of music is based on a l1e (i.e., NOT a warming world for thousands of years, now and “adjusted” data).
2nd music is based on reality (a swan).
L1es yield discord and ugliness.
Truth yields peace and beauty.
Considering the other videos, definitely off-topic.
Sounds false.
Ah the beautiful Mannian world where random noise is transformed into a beautiful waveform. Unfortunately the exponential shape rapidly leads to burst eardrums followed by heads exploding from the sheer exponentialness.
Perhaps a new genre — Echo Chamber Music.
Putting the Mann Hockey Stick to music! Belief in that scientific fake seems to persist well past the point of parody or any common sense
Science hasn’t worked. Fear hasn’t worked. They’re trying subliminal imaging for the faithful.
Got to give their psychologists a mark for persistence.
House Atreides v House Harkonnen.
Where’s my weirding module?
In the Gom-Jabbar? (sp/memory)
These people are unable to create any original musical compositions so they’ve decided to jump on the climate change gravy train and feed temperature data into a computer to synthesize rubbish.
I think the result is offensive to any real musician. It’s just… a stupid stunt!
So I guess the updated piece ends with holding a single note for 18 bars?
How about starting a piece of music with 137 bars of a bottom E flat played on string basses, in one continuous uninterrupted note.
Well I guess the bottom string on a bass is a bottom E so how do you play 137 bars of E flat ?? Well you have to have those special basses with the extender gizmo on that string to lower the pitch.
So far as I know it is the longest sustained single note in all of music.
Well it takes about another 18 hours of listening before you reach the end of the whole piece of music.
It’s called ; “Der Ring Des Nibelungen. ”
Very possibly the greatest work of art ever created by one man. And everybody can have their own copy of it, well at least the sound part of it.
Well I’m sure all the texters wouldn’t like it, and it won’t fit in one of those ni-twitters.
G
Just my opinion of course.
The lowest string of the five-string double-bass in the symphony orchestra is C.
Wagnerian orchestra requires a bass range down to C of the first octave.
Wagner’s “Ring” is possibly the longest work of art ever created by one man. Greatest? That would be an exaggeration, with all due respect to Wagner’s exquisite talent and execrable opinions.
Alexander: possibly the longest work ever?
John Cage’s “As slow as possible” beats Wagner by centuries.
The performance at St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt, Germany started in 2001 and is planned to end in year 2640. The last note change occurred on October 5, 2013. The next change will not occur until 2020.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_Slow_as_Possible
@george, I share your passion, to the extent that I’d leave out the words “very possibly”. After many years of listening to the Ring on every occasion when I’ve been able to clear a week of evenings, it still absorbs me completely from the moment that l-o-n-g E flat ripples into being until Valhalla blazes – and then leaves me wandering about with glazed eyes and a headful of leitmotive for 24 hours or more after that. It is a vast, awesome and utterly magnificent work.
@Alexander – But the Ring isn’t even close to being the longest work! To cite just two longer ones: Robert Wilson (who worked with Phil Glass on ‘Einstein on the Beach’) produced a work called ‘Ka Mountain and Guardenia Terrace: a Story about Some People Changing’ which ran continuously for seven days and nights at the 1972 Shiraz Festival in Iran; Lamonte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music have performed (in his ‘Dream Houses’) ‘Drift Studies’ in which they harmonise with tone generators which can run for months or longer. (The ‘Drift’ referref to is the inevitable pitch drift of the tone generators over that sort of time scale!) Mercifully, works on that sort of scale don’t generally attempt the catharsis which the Ring achieves so effortlessly.
In comparison, this ‘climate change music’ is about as significant as a fart in a hurricane.
Gentlemen,
Please, don’t mix up music and status noise.
Wagner is music. We may disagree about the obvious unevenness of the quality of his music, but his music is music.
Cage, Glass, and whatevertheirnames… They produce certain noises to achieve and maintain certain status. Producing such noises doesn’t require talent. Or skill. Just having good connections with the right people suffices to be a “musician” these days.
Gentlemen,
With all its warts and longeurs, Wagner’s music is music.
The other “long” stuff you have mentioned is status noise: that is, noise one produces to maintain a status achieved not by the talent or skill but by having influential connections.
Having played eletric bass, long scale, I don’t know of any device that attaches to extend a string to alter pitch and sustain the note. There is a flex pedal called a compressor which can sustain a notes. There are some ultra long scale basses that are 36″ or 37″, standard long scale is 34″. But then there are 5, 6, 8 and 12 string bases as well as multi-scale bases (Similar to what is found in a piano) to extend notes as much as possible. Strings and pickups make a difference too.
No need to bust in open doors. Cage’s “music” is rather a philosophical approach on issues on “what is music?” In physical terms soundwaves are the essential part of “music”. The Halberstadt performance is more of artistic social experiment, The beauty of this music lies not primarily in the direct soundexperience, (it is not even possible to be fully experienced), but in other aspects.such as a the capacity of humanity to sustain a piece of sound art that will require several generations to complete. Influential connections might get you somewhere for sometime, but what does it take to last 639 years?
J T
So why is our tax money being spent to sponsor this carp? Why is he/she/it being paid at all? Is not the proper “social experiment” the question: “How long can I pay for my food, clothing, and shelter by doing something useful when “I” have to pay for myself instead of stealing from others around me?”
That was just painful. In the lower registers I thought I was listening to an untalented fiddler trying to get “An die Freude” and failing. Miserably.
Mahler, too, would find it,and its title, thoroughly contemptible.
IMO
I think everyone living in the north of either hemisphere will die, far before the next glaciation. because of our governments. They are killing 10% of the population in Ontario Canada, 20% in the UK, unknown numbers in the EU and USA. It is all good. Less Co2, less people to pay taxes. less taxes, less government. I saw an article on Harper pledging to lower emissions by 30%. Eliminating cars from the road for a year will not work but they figure a carbon tax or cap and trade will. I vote for the no cars, streetcars, buses, taxis’s, etc for a year. Because at the end of that year or far before, everyone will die. No need for a carbon tax.
Mr. Crawford should have played one long pedal point starting in January 1998 through 2015, with a few micro-tones here and there.
How sad. And he seems like such an intelligent boy.
With this linked software, you don’t need the hockey stick to create music from almost anything, including fractals. Fractals should approximate true climate better than a piece of bent wood:
http://a-musical-generator.software.informer.com/
“Publisher’s description
“A Musical Generator is a shareware program that creates music and MIDI files from fractals, pictures, text and numbers. Lots of fractals can be used and each fractal can be adjusted in infinite ways to create weird, crazy or beautiful music. Also you can turn bitmaps into music. You can use the names of yourself and your friend to see whether they sound good together. And you can insert your tax figures,model results or whatever numeric source in order to create music.”
Is this what is meant by “avant garde”?
I’ll take J. S. Bach any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
Typical Leftist ‘Art’. It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be ‘on message’. And since the ones with talent have better things to do then try to impress talentless critics and teachers, it is never, ever good.
“Avante Garde” is possessing no talent on your instrument, but playing it anyway so as to look cool and pick up chicks…
The intellectual desert that is being created by the global warming meme is breath taking. If the scientists that are devoted to ‘climate science’ actually did real science instead, who knows what real problems could be solved? If these musicians created beautiful music instead of this politically correct swill, maybe their music may be played more than once.
Bach is the sound of God thinking.
Mozart is the sound of God laughing.
Beethoven is the sound of God’s wrath.
Climate change music is the sound of Satan with a bad case of the trots.
This stuff reminds me of what Peter Maxwell Davies (I think it was) is supposed to have said when asked if he’d ever conducted any [Karlheinz] Stockhausen. “No” he responded, “but I think I’ve stepped in it a few times.”
I agree with your musical tastes. But, please, explain: who created Satan?
Kind of off topic but, we did.
One great philosopher has said it this way: “… the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Or to quote another great philosopher, Pogo: “we have meet the enemy and he is us.”
Enjoyed Alexander Feht’s Violin Sonata & also the opening of ‘ THE DAY-STAR IS GONE ‘ ….until some bloke started wailing & spoilt the nice piano music.
Hehe…great anecdote! Reminds me of the one András Schiff told a few years ago during his pedagogicals on the Beethoven sonatas:
“Someone told us a story of a famous pianist who believed in bringing culture to the people, and went to a factory in Italy to give a lecture in front of a piano. He started to talk about Schönberg, and after a few minutes, a voice rose from the audience: “Shut up, and play!” Ok, he said, and sat down at the piano, playing the Schönberg piece. The voice rose again: “Rather, talk!””
Excellent. I will use that. Now this doesn’t mean all modern classical is junk. Messiaen’s Turangalila – Symphony is not for everyone, but it’s a pretty amazing piece. Likewise, a good deal of Rautavaara, and the “Holy Minimalists” like Arvo Pärt, John Tavener, and co.
You are probably right; but of the ones you mention I am only really vaguely familiar with Pärt. I seldom enjoy modern classical music; in my opinion its, at its best, more like moods and musical landscapes. At its worst it is horrible and angst-ridden broken fragments. I’d probably always prefer Beethoven and Brahms, Mozart and Haydn, Schubert, Schumann and Chopin. Add Verdi and Bach to the mix, and there’s likely enough music to study and enjoy to last a lifetime. I would definitely draw a pretty sharp line after composers like Grieg, Dvořák and Tchaikovsky. I have heard precious little classical music I can enjoy that was made after the First World War; that war that seemed to have had enormous consequences for European culture and morale.
Gard R. Rise:
I invite you to try my music. I guarantee you will like some of it.
Shameless self-promotion: my CDs are sold on Amazon.com.
Just search for my name.
Some of my music can be heard on YouTube.
Dear Mr. Feht,
A bit of help with the promotion #(:))
Alexander Feht (youtube channel)
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt2N-nAhjyiUTWtV0Oqju6A
Sonata 1 — Movement 1
Composed and Performed by Alexander Feht (violin)
Bravo!
Thank you for revealing your talent to us. Novosibirsk’s loss was America’s gain.
Wishing you well (has it FINALLY stopped snowing over there yet?! 🙂 ),
Janice
Alexander Feht’s music is available at Amazon.com
Here are Sonatas 1 and 2
http://www.amazon.com/Violin-Sonatas-1-Alexander-Feht/dp/B00AI94C8Y/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1432867317&sr=8-6&keywords=music+Alexander+Feht
Janice,
Thank you, composed by me but performed (very well) by a Russian girl, Eudokia Ionina. Well, she was a girl in Novosibirsk, when I left Russia, now she teaches violin in the Central Music School in Moscow. The pianist is Asia Korepanova, she is also from Moscow but the last time I heard she was in Miami.
Alexander: You’re welcome. Excellent musicians (and composing, too), indeed.
Very nice, Alexander!
I might have easily missed this, save for plowing through the whole 9 yards again from the top…
There’s no doubt now that we’re all doomed. They have the sad violin music to prove it.
What a croc. The music had nothing to do with data that was being displayed during the clips.
You were actually able to listen to it? Wow. Some people are indomitable heroes.
Enjoyed Alexander Feht’s Violin Sonata & also the opening of ‘ THE DAY-STAR IS GONE ‘ ….until some bloke started wailing & spoilt the nice piano music.
Yeah, I couldn’t figure out if the music didn’t match the point on the graph or if the two were out of sync. And I’m not going back to try again. I think in the second piece the range of the bands were adjusted to give each instrument its full range, otherwise the tropical band would have been had all the novelty of a drone on a set of bagpipes.
There have been other attempts to use music to better understand data. A lot of the ones that try to come up with something listenable loose a lot of information. This may have kept the information, but it didn’t add interest.
Standards of English are falling. The sloppy comments seen on’ blog’ sites, devoid of punctuation and riddled with spelling errors are evidence for this.
People don’t ‘do’ music, it’s played, studied, composed, enjoyed and so forth.
There’s also the phrase ‘we do science’ – lazy English, devoid of all colour and detail.
‘Newspeak’ is upon us!