Currents: Movement 1 (2020)
Currents is a musical work that depicts the NOAA’s database of the last forty years of billion dollar weather disasters in the United States. Collectively, the 258 weather events depicted in the piece have cost $1.75 trillion and have taken 13,249 lives. From 2010-2019 alone, there were 119 events that cost $802 billion and claimed 5,217 lives. Currents is a way of giving this data a more visceral narrative, keeping the conversation afloat about the urgency of climate change and the ominous shift in weather patterns on our planet.
The NOAA’s data is translated into music through sonification, which can be described as “the process of mapping data with some other meaning into sound” (John Luther Adams). Although the piece uses live instruments, Movement I is generated using electronically recorded sounds. The movement provides an overview of the entire dataset from 1980 to 2019 using visual graphs, natural recorded sounds, and FM synthesized sounds.
Below is a breakdown of how Movement I works. For a more complete look at all six movements of Currents, click here.
The Sounds in Movement 1
The three sounds below are used in Movement 1 to depict the data. All of these are my own personal field recordings I recorded between 2016 and 2019 in three different national parks (Smoky Mountains, Grand Canyon, Hawaii Volcanoes). A quick word on the “Hawaii Ocean” sound clip: this was recorded using a hydrophone, an underwater microphone designed to listen in to aquatic life. The crackling sound is being made by snapping shrimp creating bubbles using their 60 mph pistol-like claws.
Sonification #1: Number of Weather Events
As you listen to Movement 1, there are three streams of data occurring at once: the number of billion dollar disasters per year, cost (in billions of dollars), and deaths. The sounds above are used to sonify these data points. In other words, you don’t just see the data. You can hear it.
Let’s break down these three streams of data. In the audio example below, you are hearing 40 years worth of data compressed into this minute long clip. The sound of the crickets is being manipulated to represent the number of billion dollar weather disasters each year from 1980-2019. What changes can you hear? Just based on the sound, what is the data trying to tell you?
Now let’s pair the sonification (the sound of the data) with a visual graph to help us see what is going on with the data.
As you can see, the number of weather disasters each year has increased dramatically over the past four decades. As you can hear, the sound of the crickets reflects this narrative by dropping in pitch as the number of weather disasters increases each year.
It might seem counter intuitive that the pitch of the crickets goes down as the number of disasters goes up, but this is one of the many micro decisions I had to make as a composer in the process of writing this piece. I felt that the lower pitched cricket sounds had an alarm bell-like quality to them, which I thought better represented the threat of more weather disasters per year. Remember that the process of sonification is not just scientific and data driven; it is artistic as well.
Sonification #2: Cost
The second stream of data is the cost of each weather event (as measured in billions of U.S. dollars and CPI adjusted for inflation). Here, we will focus on only five years worth of data from 2000 to 2005. The underwater recording from the hydrophone is used to sonify this data. The longer the burst of sound, the greater the cost of the event.
If you have headphones on, you will hear this sound is all the way in the right speaker. Remember this for later: it will help you keep track once all three of the data streams are running at the same time. You might also notice the sounds of crashing ocean waves coming in at certain points. This sound is used to designate exceptionally high cost events ($20 billion or more). The clear outlier in this data comes in 2005 with Hurricane Katrina, a weather disaster that generated 7000 times more rubble than the Twin Towers and cost our country $167 billion.
Sonification #3: Deaths
The third stream of data is the deaths associated with each weather event. Here again we will limit our focus to the year 2000 to 2005, but the full Movement 1 will depict all 40 years in detail. The bird recording is used to sonify this data. Similar to how the cricket sounds were manipulated, there is an inverse relationship between sound and data: the birds decrease in pitch as the death toll rises.
If you have headphones on, you will hear this sound is all the way in the left speaker. You might also notice the sounds of additional birds used to designate exceptionally fatal events (100 lives or more). These are the sounds of black-capped chickadees, a bird that has an exceptional threat level communication system. Chickadees have been found to change the length of their bird calls based on the kind of predator they perceive in the area. The more threatened they feel, the longer their bird call. Here, the recording of the chickadees are used as a symbol to warn us of the ominous shifts in weather patterns on our planet.
Coming together…
Below, the video gives a shortened overview of Movement 1. A special focus is given to the years 2000 to 2005, which was discussed in the previous two steps above. Get a feel for the placement of the three visual data graphs and see if you can hear all three data streams running at the same time.
Movement 1 In Its Entirety
Now that you have seen what goes into the three streams of data sonification, here is Movement 1 of Currents in its entirety.