We constantly see photographs illustrating the effect of climate change, but what does our warming planet look like?In the hands of an environmental specialist and music enthusiast, the answer is a string quartet composition that’s compelling and cacophonous, and rarely song-making and nostalgic.
Sonification, the process of converting data into audio, has spawned a number of soundtracks aimed at raising awareness about climate change, but they often lean more toward soundscapes than what most of us would call music.
Hiroto Nagai, a geoenvironmental scientist at Rissho University in Japan and also a composer, wanted to see what would happen if he tried to use sonified knowledge to create a climate-related sound that more aligned with the classical precepts of musical composition.
The result is “String Quartet No. 1 “Polar Energy Budget”, a six-minute piece created from more than 30 years of weather data. The term “energy budgeting” refers to the exchange of physical energy on the Earth’s surface from solar radiation. . You can pay attention to the composition below.
“What’s the selection of the intimate sound of a string quartet to make that data explicit,” Mason Bates, a composer and professor at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, said in an interview. “It’s amazing to hear the heat of those tools attached to an invisible system. “
A string quartet premiered the piece live in Tokyo last year, and Nagai highlights its history and method of creation in a paper published Thursday in the open-access journal iScience, just in time for Earth Day. With “Polar Energy Budget,” the composer said he sought to highlight the possibilities and demanding situations of combining sonification with classical musical compositions. And while “Polar Energy Budget,” the first musical composition created from meteorological knowledge, Nagai hopes his piece will add to the developing art framework created to raise environmental awareness and motivate more artists to use the knowledge when creating their work.
Nagai began by attributing sounds to environmental data publicly collected at four polar locations between 1982 and 2022: an ice core drilling site on the Greenland ice sheet, a satellite station in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, and two Japanese research stations in Antarctica. . , Showa Station and Fuji Dome Station. The data measured short- and long-wave radiation, precipitation, surface temperature, and cloud thickness.
He then modified the pitches of the knowledge points, assigning sections to the instruments: two violins, a viola, and a cello. Unlike the sonification of knowledge, which converts knowledge into audio, Nagai believes that the “muscification” of knowledge requires human intervention.
“As a basic precept of musical composition, it consists of mixing temporal sequences from the creation of tension to the solution in other scales, from harmonic progressions to complete movements,” he writes in the iScience article. It’s actively interfering with and influencing the feelings of the public. “
Nagai added his own keys, such as introducing rhythm, confident sounds, and adding sections that he had composed himself.
Composer Hiroto Nagai will see more artists leverage knowledge to create their work.
Other people who have sought to tell stories about climate through music include Lee de Mora and Daniel Crawford, marine ecosystem modelers. Ten years ago, while studying music at the University of Minnesota, Crawford teamed up with a geography professor to turn recordings of global temperatures into musical notes for a cello piece called “A Song of Our Warming Planet. “Two years later, the duo returned with “Planetary Bands, Warming World,” a composition for string quartet based on NASA temperature data.
Composers Szymon Weiss and Szymon Sutor reinterpreted Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” with the effects of climate change in mind, a commission captured in a short documentary.
Composer Bates of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music said Nagai’s piece would rank high among the fashionable classics.
“Nagai uses knowledge in the same way that modernist composers once constructed melodies from random notes,” said Bates, who doesn’t care about the work. “The result is neither overtly expressive nor emotional. “
That sense of detachment, Nagai in an interview, suits the subject.
“Although the melody may seem cold and temperamental, without any empathy for human emotions,” he said, “it represents the true essence of nature. “
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