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/
Yes. Here Empress Christine McEntee has found new ways to squander AGU’s money.
Ha ha Ja ja
He should have played it on an accordion whilst tap dancing.
So that’s what my wife should be writing songs about! Well, no wonder she isn’t rich and famous!
Guess good ole Rock Music just doesn’t cut it anymore in this age of The Green.
I will try and convince her to change her band name from Wicked Wench to “Climate Change is Real” and to write a Ballard in the key of B Minor (the saddest of all keys!) called “our Earth warmed and died”. Who knows she may even get an arts grant to fund the Recording and Awareness video.
Wickedwenchfan: The power inherent in a good riff has long been forgotten by the ‘suits’ in the music industry.
What gets an audience on their feet and dancing? Proper rock ‘n’ roll, nothing else works!
The biggest crowd I’ve ever seen around a group of buskers centred around a trio of youngsters playing rockabilly material. Electric guitar, acoustic bass and a snare drum plus of course vocals. They really were in the ‘groove’ – they generated a terrific musical pulse, and the crowd loved it.
I like a wide variety of music, but after hearing the offering on the first video on this post I have to say I’m not inclined to listen to the rest!
Langenbahn May 27, 2015 at 9:49 pm
But Haydn is the sound of music.
Haydn: symphony no. 39 (“tempesta di mare”) in G minor, Trevor Pinnock, The English Concert
Haydn wrote over 100 symphonies, there are many great ones, and almost all are bright, uplifting, dynamic, rhythmic, with memorable themes, and melodic interplay that are signatures of this creative genius. All of that is on full display here.
This #39 is attributed to his sturm und drang period, but for the most part, I find this work dynamic, but playful and humorous in the 1st movement, serene and placid in the 2nd, uplifting and optimistic in the 3rd, and it is only when we get to the more urgent theme of the 4th, that the sturm und drang tag might fit.
I lasted a few seconds with the other stuff.
Haydn the decline?
“Hadyn the decline?”
Ooooh ….
Steve P: I was always partial to Hadyn 31. But I’m a hornist so … Also really enjoy Brahms’ Hadyn variations. Especially var 7 – again lots of horn.
More like Haydn the master.
Boom tish – Here all week folks
What an utter waste of time and student tuition money.
They should write an octet that demonstrates how all 8 planets are warming.
And who can forget “Requiem for a Glacier” from a couple of years ago :
http://www.vancouversun.com/entertainment/cms/binary/8718873.jpg
http://www.vancouversun.com/entertainment/Orchestra+travels+Kootenays+play+requiem+melting+glacier/8718868/story.html
This performance was just in the “nick of time”. That glacier has now melted, flowed into the ocean, evaporated, went into the upper atmosphere, met up with some sleazy diatomic gas molecules, increased the greenhouse gas density and made the world hotter than a Bill Clinton party.
All because of SeeOhToo.
They wish, lol. Apparently someone is looking to build a ski resort on the thing – it’s very much “alive and well” – some day they will hopefully be duly embarrassed about their little concert.
If you wanted CACC music…
nearwoodmusic.co.uk/Climate.htm
https://www.youtube.com/user/NearwoodMusic
How did they determine which temperatures to use? If they’re using the global mean, how the hay did they get that much variation in notes? Seems rather – chaotic.
They’re playing to an accuracy of 0.1 C. How do they represent the systematic uncertainty in the air temperature record? If global warming is the defining problem of their generation, doesn’t it merit that they should actually be paying attention to detail?
What skewed notes, what muddying of pitch, should be added to represent the fact that global temperature isn’t known to better than ±0.5 C?
Is lying with music OK, when feelings are sincerely held?
Daniel Crawford is untrained in science, but speaks intelligently. What will he do when he finally realizes that he has been misled? That his integrity has been violated, his feelings manipulated, and his good intentions have been hijacked to destructive ends?
His mentor, Scott St. George, is a paleo-climatologist. He uncritically cites the work of Mann, and others, on paleo-temperature reconstruction. E.g., in St. George, Scott (2014) Past Global Changes Magazine 22, 16-17 pdf. This means he accepts that one can use strict statistics to covert a tree ring metric (mm or gm/cc) into Celsius (C). That is, he claims a physical result in the absence of any physical theory. This marks him, at best, as thoroughly untrained in physical thinking.
So we have, at best, the untrained guiding the uneducated.
including non-science majors. Does it include anyone else?
I actually thought this was going to be an interesting article on how humidity and temperature affect the sounds of an orchestra. Does Vivaldi played in an air conditioned room sound like it was meant to?
I’m quite disappointed, actually.
That is really ” music” with a silent , pronounced ” Rap”…….
Correction :-
That is really ” music” with a silent C , pronounced ” Rap”…….
Might interest you to know that the Kawai Piano company has recently come out with an upright specifically for Rap Music:
:large
It sounds like to play “climate music” you don’t actually need any musical talent. Just like to be a “climate scientist” you don’t need any scientific knowledge.
[snip, ok I know its funny, but we can do without that one here, Anthony]
Global warming as natural variation?
Yhank you for sharing that. Wonderful.
Here’s another Norwegian with a fiddle, the 8 string variety:
(Fanitullen = devil’s dance)
[Soft music. Easy to enjoy. So why do they call it a hardanger fiddle? .mod]
Cos it’s from the Hardanger region in Norway!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardanger
Oh, the humanities.
Heh, heh, very good. Under the auspices of Modernism and the demands of specialization, the Sciences and the Humanities have made a pact with each other: The sciences will pretend that Finnegan’s Wake is high art and not solipsistic cow dung, and the humanities will profess to believe in the Big Bang, Quantum Mechanics, Climate Change, Evolution, whatever else the sciences throw out there.
Good one, Bruce.
So, how much tax payer money was wasted on this bullshit?
What’s really ironic that the climate data is overwhelmingly unharmonious noise.
As for “defining issue of our generation” … do they know any young people? Do they have kids?
… unless by “generation” they mean left-wing university lecturers obsessed by environmentalism.
It’s called virtue signalling – proving how much of a better person you are without actually doing anything to make the world better. Sort of like translating a temperature record into music.
Jeez
This is the actual “music” of climate
10 hours of flicker noise – 10 boring hours of nothing but randomness. They should force them to listen to this performance:
Perfect tune for global warming music. Just need to change the lyrics!
https://youtu.be/nGOKi3nIDrc
OK,
Sing along!
I know a fat old warmunist
He’s always on our street.
A fat and jolly red-faced man
He really is a treat.
He’s always suing skeptics
He’s never known to frown.
And everybody says
He is the happiest man in town!.
He laughs at the scientific method
He laughs when getting grants.
He laughs at everybody
When he’s a climactic clairvoyant
He never can stop laughing
He says he’s never tried.
But once he faked a hockey stick
And laughed until he cried!
Oh ho ho ho ho ho ho. Ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Ho ho ho ho ho ho ho. Ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Thank you one and all.
This post is providing some marvellous light relief.
It even appears to have frightened away the trolls.
The last piece referenced was “Fiddling While the Earth Warms”.
Perhaps a more apropos title would be “Fiddling With the Data”.
+1
One of the stupidest things i ever seen or heard in my life.
FFS, are we at Poe’s Law yet?