SC CSC & Students Create Music from Earth's Past Climate

The South Central Climate Science Center collaborated with the New Improv! Century Ensemble (N!CE) to sonify 400,000 years of atmospheric carbon dioxide and global average temperature data from ice cores and proxy data. N!CE is a student musical group in The University of Oklahoma School of Music that is made up of student composers and very adventurous performers, under the direction of Dr. Marc Jensen. The students worked with the data over the Spring 2015 semester, culminating in a performance of their pieces on Monday, April 20, 2015 at the National Weather Center’s Biennale. Continue to the bottom of the article to find links to the musical interpretations >>

N!CE was established in the 1990s as a venue for more experimental, open-ended music making. For the past year, the group has been focused on work with laptops as instruments for performance and more recently, the group has refined this focus to look specifically at data sonification. Sonification, sometimes referred to as “auditory display”, is the use of non-speech audio to convey information. Rendering data sets in this way as sound rather than traditional visual displays can take advantage of the ear’s ability to detect subtle patterns or variations, or it can also be used to convey information in situations where an operator needs constant feedback on the status of a task, but cannot look away at a display, such as in surgery.

Since the dataset of carbon dioxide and global average temperature contained subtle variations and a large range of values, N!CE felt that sonification could provide a unique perspective on Earth’s past climate. Sonifications run the gamut from very stark data representations, to musical compositions that become artistic interpretations of the source material. Most sonifications fall somewhere between these two poles, with some degree of artistic license balanced against some degree of clear data representation. The degree of interpretive freedom depends on the function of the work.

Every member of the group was given the same data set to sonify. The students were given this data with virtually no limitations in how to interpret it as sound, working together to craft approaches and share observations on the process. Many of the students focused on the strong correlation between carbon dioxide and global average temperature and the subtleties of which factor led or followed over rapid changes. Zach Daniels, a Masters student in Music Composition, noted that many people look at data as “a string of meaningless values on a page,” but that sonification is “a great way to bring important issues, like climate change, into a new light.” Dr. Jensen also commented that a big take-home for the students was that “the most striking thing that jumps out about Earth’s climate history is how atypical warm climate periods have been.”

Our thanks to the following members of N!CE for their work on this project: Zachary Daniels, Kerry Folsom, Marc Jensen, Kyriakos Tsoukalas, and Kyle Vanderburg.

Marc's simple representation - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8R5usATRcvQ
Marc's Correlations - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPkTqTioq58
Kerry's Carbon Takeover - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VprAs7Or9pc
Kyriakos' Earthly - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLHaJ6Fj6-s
Zach’s Weathered Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue-L9xBTilg
Kyle’s Cascades - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxYT-838hI0

 

The South Central Climate Science Center (SC CSC) is part of a network of 8 regional Department of the Interior Climate Science Centers across the United States. The SC CSC is managed through the U.S. Geological Survey and consists of a consortium of institutions, including the University of Oklahoma.