via Ensia
It may not have the immediate hit of a mind-controlled cello duet, but it's a slow burn that stands to bring the harsh reality of global warming to a fever pitch.
With the sweep of a bow and the slide of some fingers, Daniel Crawford, a student at the University of Minnesota, demonstrates how temperatures continue to rise, with the average global temperature having jumped about 0.8 °C (1.4 °F) since 1880. He calls it "A Song of Our Warming Planet," and in the above video talks about how he sonified a set of data gathered by NASA's Goddard Institue of Space Studies that's based on information on surface temperature.
Here's how it works. Each note represents a year from 1880 to 2012, and the pitch portrays the average temperature of the planet relative to the 1951-80 base line. Low notes reflect cooler years, while high notes represent warmer ones. As Crawford plays, a graph matching the music continues to grow, showing that the temperature is rising significantly each year.
“Scientists predict the planet will warm by another 1.8 degrees Celsius by the end of this century," Crawford says. This additional heaating would hash out a series of notes well beyond the range of human hearing, though it could very well be depicted like "A Song of Our Warming Planet" insofar as mere words, graphs or video--conventional data visualitzation techniques--would fail.
“Climate scientists have a standard toolbox to communicate their data,” Crawford said. “We’re trying to add another tool to that toolbox, another way to communicate these ideas to people who might get more out of music than maps, graphs and numbers.”