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Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A new project is enlisting artists to listen to sound tracks of acoustic monitors in reefs and other ecological locations, so they can raise the alarm if anything sounds different.
World Science Festival: How music and science combine to monitor climate change
By Jessica McGrath Posted yesterday at 9:27am
Bubbling beakers and Bunsen burners are being traded in for drum machines, sound generators and music software at the World Science Festival in Brisbane.
Music researcher Dr Leah Barclay told the 100 Ways To Listen project that artists and scientists working together could unlock the secrets of climate change.
“The way we think about music and the way sound artists listen, can really influence and inspire how scientists are responding to climate change,” she said.
Recording sound from different environments, allowed music scientists to monitor climate change, by using hydrophones and binaural microphones that mimicked the same technology as the human ear.
“Dramatic changes in aquatic ecosystems can go unnoticed simply due to visibility,” said Dr Barclay, whose hydrology piece featured recordings of the world’s water systems collected over a decade.
This non-invasive technique called acoustic ecology enabled the researchers “to listen to an active and healthy reef and hear active fish and snapping shrimp” or the increased traffic of Humpback whales, she said.
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Read more: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-28/world-science-festival-music-and-climate-change/8390094
Who needs quantitative physical measurements, when we can learn all we need to know about the climate, from the chatter of the snapping shrimp, or artists’ interpretation of whale songs?
They are called Pistol Shrimp because of the loud noise they make- at least here in the south. Are we too politically correct to use that term anymore, so had to change it?
Yes. It’s well known that climate change causes an increase in gun violence, so they didn’t want to bias the study if any of the artists listening were rappers.
While anchored in the creek off Beaufort, S.C. several years ago the ‘swimps’ (creek shrimp) just outside the boat hull got so noisy on some nights you could hardly sleep. I never new there was non-snapping shrimp until reading this article.
know kiddin’?
But the real acoustic oceanography does begin at Perth, and ends at Bermuda. Sonic travel time in 1960: 13375 seconds; 2004? 13375 seconds. No warming.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0967063714000041
http://oceanbites.org/one-persons-noise-is-another-persons-data/
Brian Dushaw: ” The measurements in 1960 were established to have a meaningful accuracy, and equivalent signals were computed using numerical ocean state estimates for 2004. No change in travel time (hence no change in temperature from 1960 to 2004) was observed.”
http://staff.washington.edu/dushaw/
–AGF
I used to have a record a long time ago where some bright person had the idea of assigning a musical notes to the the constant variations in Earth’s magnetic field. It wasn’t terrifically good music and no, I wasn’t smoking anything at the time, but it was quite interesting. Strangely it didn’t alter the climate and I lost the record. I’m sure This is a renewed opportunity for vast research funding today.
“Bubbling beakers and Bunsen burners are being traded in for drum machines…”
I think we need some of these musicians getting up-close-and-personal with cows to listen to their farts. The methane they produce is supposedly a huge factor in global warming…we need to identify any possible changes in their flatulence. Maybe some other skilled artists can try to use other sense as well (e.g., smell).
Actually most of the methane comes out at the front end, so we first need a research program to find how to correlate the number of “mooh”‘s to the amount of methane released.