Fiddling While the World Warms 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: Fiddling a Warming Tune 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: