Sonification of the atmospheric carbon record: 1988–1992 and 2014–2019 ...

• Main Author: Twedt, Judy
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Dryad 2023
• Subjects: carbon record; Ice cores; Mauna Loa; Sonification; EPICA; Law Dome; ice ages; glaciations; Climate change; Keeling curve; FOS Earth and related environmental sciences; Scripps
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.f7m0cfz1v; https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.f7m0cfz1v

These two pieces are part of a collection of sound compositions called Timescales, which sonifies datasets spanning different time scales of the atmospheric carbon record. Sonification is analogous to visualization. In visualizations, data is mapped to an image; in sonification data is mapped to sound. In Situ 1988 and In Situ 2014 both sonify five years of atmospheric carbon data from the Mauna Loa Observatory, commonly known as the Keeling Curve. The pieces present the carbon record at weekly, monthly, and yearly timescales with a musical scale and translate historical time to musical time. Unlike standard graphical presentations of data, these sound compositions allow the listener to hear the data as physical resonance over time. ... : These sonifications were created with atmospheric carbon records from the Mauna Loa Observatory: C. D. Keeling, S. C. Piper, R. B. Bacastow, M. Wahlen, T. P. Whorf, M. Heimann, and H. A. Meijer, Exchanges of atmospheric CO2 and 13CO2 with the terrestrial biosphere and oceans from 1978 to 2000. I. Global aspects, SIO Reference Series, No. 01-06, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, San Diego, 88 pages, 2001. http://escholarship.org/uc/item/09v319r9 In Situ data was processed and converted to MIDI notes using Python, and sonified using Supercollider. The data is mapped to a 12-tone equal-temperament scale spanning three octaves, with 340 ppm and 420 ppm as the lower and upper limits of the data range. In this mapping, 340 ppm is sonified as 130.81 Hz, and 420 ppm is sonified as 1046.50Hz. For these pieces, I wanted the sonic familiarity of an equal-temperament scale, so I chose a 12-tone scale to maximize the number of frequency bins (36 in total) within a relatively narrow range. The start years 1988 and 2014 ...