Scientist transforms climate change data into classical music

By Stephen Beech via SWNS

Climate data has been turned into a ground-breaking piece of classical music.

The six-minute-long composition - entitled “String Quartet No. 1: Polar Energy Budget”- is based on over 30 years of satellite-collected climate data from the Arctic and Antarctic.

The Japanese geo-environmental scientist who composed the piece aims to draw attention to how climate is driven by the input and output of energy at the poles.

Doctor Hiroto Nagai, of Rissho University, said: “I strongly hope that this manuscript marks a significant turning point, transitioning from an era where only scientists handle data to one where artists can freely leverage data to craft their works.”

He says that music, as opposed to sound, evokes an emotional response and believes that “musification” - as opposed to sonification - of data requires some intervention by the composer to "build tension" and add dynamics.

For that reason, Dr. Nagai was more liberal in adding a “human touch” compared to previous data-based musical compositions, aiming to meld sonification with traditional music composition.

He said: “As a fundamental principle in music composition, it is necessary to combine temporal sequences from tension-building to resolution in various scales, from harmonic progressions to entire movements.

“So far, there haven’t been published attempts and open discussion on sonification-based music composition, nor attempts to demonstrate the methodology required to intentionally affect the audience’s emotions with an artistic piece.”

Dr. Nagai first used a program to sonify environmental data by assigning sounds to different data values.

The publicly available data was collected from four polar locations between 1982 and 2022.

They were an ice-core drilling site in the Greenland ice sheet, a satellite station in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, and two Japanese-owned research stations in the Antarctic.

For each of the locations, Dr. Nagai used data on monthly measurements of short- and longwave radiation, precipitation, surface temperature, and cloud thickness.

He then transformed the collection of sounds into a musical composition to be played by two violins, a viola, and a cello.

The process involved several stages, including manipulating the pitch of different datapoints and assigning sections of data to the different instruments, overlaying passages created from different data, and introducing musical playing techniques such as pizzicato and staccato.

Dr. Nagai also intervened in more artistic ways by introducing rhythm, deliberately removing certain sounds, and introducing handwritten - non-data derived - parts into the composition.

The quartet’s premiere live performance was shared at Waseda University in Tokyo in March last year.

A filmed performance of the piece by PRT Quartet, a Japanese professional string ensemble, was also released.

Haruka Sakuma, a professional violinist who performed on the recording, said: “Upon listening, my initial reaction was like, ‘What is this?’ It felt like a typical contemporary piece.

“The flow of the music was a bit hard to memorize quickly, and it was quite challenging at first.”

Dr. Nagai says that, in contrast to graphical representations of data, music "elicits emotion before intellectual curiosity".

He suggests that using graphical and musical representations of data in conjunction might be even more powerful.

Dr. Nagai added: “It grabs the audiences’ attention forcefully, while graphical representations require active and conscious recognition instead.

“This reveals the potential for outreach in the Earth sciences through music.”

The backstory about how the composition was put together was published in the journal iScience.