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2 July 2013updated 22 Oct 2020 3:55pm

Our warming planet, set to music

This is what climate change sounds like.

By Alex Hern

I like data. Charts, graphs, tables, spreadsheets: anything which communicates information is good in my book (although infographics can get wearing, I’ll admit). But I’ve not before heard music which does the same job.

Via Grist‘s Jess Zimmerman, I’ve now seen the work of University of Minnesota student Daniel Crawford, who has composed a piece of music based on our warming planet. Give it a listen. It’s entrancing:

In the composition, each note represents a year from 1880 to 2012. The pitch is set so that the coldest year on record is equal to the lowest note on a cello, and each semitone is equal to “roughly 0.03˚C of planetary warming“. The result is a haunting atonal composition – but also one which steadily rises in pitch, finishing three octaves above where it began. Similar projects normally set the data being played to a scale, which makes it easier to listen to (here’s Pi in the key of C Major, for instance), but it’s appropriate that something as catastrophic as climate change should be set to music which is fundamentally unsettling.

Not so unsettling as the line at the end, though:

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Scientists predict the planet will warm by another 1.8°C (3.2°F) by the end of this century. This additional warming would produce a series of notes beyond the range of human hearing.

In case you want to play along at home, the sheet music is here and an MP3 of the song is here

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