Fascinating!
The 2017 hurricane season provided a glimpse into what climate change enhanced hurricanes will look like. The North Atlantic hurricanes devastated communities from Houston to Barbuda.
At Penn State, a professor of meteorology, and a professor of music technology have worked together “to sonify the dynamics of tropical storms. In other words, we turn environmental data into music”.
x xYouTube VideoThe Conversation reports on the sonification of wind storms.
A hurricane lifetime can last anywhere from a day to a few weeks. Agencies such as the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration continuously measure all sorts of features of a storm.
We distilled the changing characteristics of a hurricane into four features measured every six hours: air pressure, latitude, longitude and asymmetry, a measure of the pattern of the winds blowing around the storm’s center.
To create the sonifications, we export these data into the music synthesis program SuperCollider. Here, numerical values can be scaled and transposed as necessary so that, for example, a storm lasting several days can be played over just a few minutes or seconds.
Each type of data is then treated like a part in a musical score. Data are used to “play” synthesized instruments that have been created to make sounds suggestive of a storm and to blend well together.
In our recordings, air pressure is conveyed by a swirling, windy sound reflecting pressure changes. More intense hurricanes have lower values of air pressure at sea level. The winds near the ground are also stronger in intense storms.
As pressure lowers, the speed of the swirling in our sonic recordings increases, the volume increases and the windy sound becomes brighter