The University of Minnesota’s environmental magazine Ensia has posted on the latest effort by a cello-playing undergraduate, Daniel Crawford, and the geographer Scott St. George to create musical compositions reflecting aspects of global climate change. (See my coverage of a 2013 composition by Crawford here.)
Here’s an excerpt from the Ensia post, by Todd Reubold:
Based on surface temperature analysis from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the composition Planetary Bands, Warming World uses music to create a visceral encounter with more than a century’s worth of weather data collected across the northern half of the planet. (The specific dataset used as the foundation of the composition was the Combined Land-Surface Air and Sea-Surface Water Temperature Anomalies Zonal annual means.)
Crawford composed the piece featuring performance by students Julian Maddox, Jason Shu, Alastair Witherspoon and Nygel Witherspoon from the University of Minnesota’s School of Music.
As Crawford explains in the video, “Each instrument represents a specific part of the Northern Hemisphere. The cello matches the temperature of the equatorial zone. The viola tracks the mid latitudes. The two violins separately follow temperatures in the high latitudes and in the arctic.” The pitch of each note is tuned to the average annual temperature in each region, so low notes represent cold years and high notes represent warm years.
Crawford and St. George decided to focus on northern latitudes to highlight the exceptional rate of change in the Arctic. St. George says the duo plans to write music representing the southern half of the planet, too, but haven’t done so yet.
Through music, the composition bridges the divide between logic and emotion, St. George says. “We often think of the sciences and the arts as completely separate — almost like opposites, but using music to share these data is just as scientifically valid as plotting lines on a graph,” he says. “Listening to the violin climb almost the entire range of the instrument is incredibly effective at illustrating the magnitude of change — particularly in the Arctic which has warmed more than any other part of the planet.”
As regular visitors will know, I’m a big fan of using all means to convey environmental changes and their implications for society — and particularly music.
I’ve previously written about a composition created by a couple of researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory using digital violin to chart 600 years of climate variations:
And then there are the Antarctic-inspired music and visual creations of Paul D. Miller, the hip-hop composer who performs as D J Spooky:
And you probably know that my definition of multimedia communication includes songwriting and performing. In case you missed it, here’s my three-minute musical history of humanity’s love affair with fossil fuels, “Liberated Carbon.”
