Timescales of carbon: In Situ 1988, In Situ 2014
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 sou...
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| Format: | Dataset |
| Language: | unknown |
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2023
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| Online Access: | https://zenodo.org/record/7809439 https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.f7m0cfz1v |
| Summary: | 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. This is a stereo wav file and can be played through any digital music player. 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 were chosen because those are the years when CO2 reached 350 and 400 ppm, respectively. 1988 is also the year when NASA scientist James Hansen briefed Congress on the dangers of the rampant rise in ... |
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