While a student at the University of Minnesota was creating a cello composition around the last 130 years of global temperature change, a couple of researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory were producing a similar composition, for digital violin and with a much longer score ? charting more than 600 years of climate variations and recent warming:
The project was conceived by S. Julio Friedmann, the chief energy technologist at the lab, and the animation was created by Michael Loomis, a longtime programmer at the lab with a penchant for data visualization.
Friedmann sent this explanatory note:
I had a number of reasons for doing this. Chief was that I found that many people simply didn?t understand ? internally, viscerally ? the relative timing, magnitude, and rates of the climate changes. A scientist can look at the graphs and get it, but most people won?t intuitively understand. Among other things, this leads to confusion about what?s a natural cycle versus an unusual, indeed unique, detour away from natural signals. Sound was a new way to communicate this ? orthogonal, and compelling.
I?m trained as a classical composer (undergrad degree ? studied with John Harbison and Peter Child at MIT), so like the cellist [at the University of Minnesota] I too imagined this ultimately being picked up by artists and worked.
My hope is to inspire the blogosphere and start putting sound files from multiple climate records on a website for all to use. I?ve reserved the domain name climatesounds.org, but haven?t activated the page yet.
Here?s more from Friedmann:
This is the reconstructed global climate record from 1400-2012, with the temperatures from 1960-2012 coming from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration modern temperature record. Playback is a violin playing 1/16th notes (one note = four years).
In an e-mail message I offered this thought:
In a perfect world you?d have the uncertainty range reflected in the sound (a ?cloud? of violins)?
He replied:
A future project will assign instruments to the upper and lower bounds, which converge through time?. Similarly, I?ve got the Vostok ice core temperature record heading your way soon.
A couple of days ago, after hearing the cello composition, Paul D. Miller, the hip-hop composer who performs as D J Spooky, sent me a link to some of his recent compositions created after a trip to Antarctica, which are also derived from climate data.
He said he plans to contact this batch of ?sonification? experimenters about the idea of organizing a performance in New York.
I can?t wait to hear the result. And if there?s a guitar or mandolin part, I?ll join in.
Here?s some video I shot in 2011 of Miller and the Telos Ensemble performing selections from his Sinfonia Antarctica:
Source: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/10/fiddling-while-the-world-warms/?partner=rss&emc=rss
empire state building prince harry Hurricane hunger games Joey Kovar Expendables 2 Pussy Riot
কোন মন্তব্য নেই:
একটি মন্তব্য পোস্ট করুন