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Climate change is a crisis that impacts all aspects of our lives. Over the years, many visualizations have emerged to convey the urgency of warming temperatures, rising seasons, and increasingly extreme weather. Harlan Brothers is advancing a new mode of climate change communication through data sonification.
Delegates pass a global-warming stripe graphic, created by University of Reading climate scientist Ed Hawkins, to represent global temperature rises, displayed during the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow on November 9, 2021. (Photo by Paul ELLIS / AFP) (Photo by PAUL ELLIS/AFP via Getty Images)
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Wanting to know more about data sonification, I reached out to Brothers to find out what motivated his work. He told me, “I trained as a musician at the Berklee College of Music….. I then went back to school to study math. This led me to work with Benoit Mandelbrot. I became an expert on the subject of fractals and music.” However, recent climate warming visualizations by Vitaliy Kaurov, a physicist and Chief Editor of Staff Picks at Wolfram Research and University of Ottawa scholar Patrick Georges inspired Brothers to translant alarming crisis trends into sound.
That’s where data sonification comes in. Writing in his blog, Brothers said, “Sonification is a relatively new term of art. Interestingly, spellcheckers still don’t recognize the word. It refers to the process of transforming information into sound that falls within the human hearing range.” It’s not surprising that a data scientist formally trained in music at the Berklee College of Music would be at the forefront of this new mode of climate communication.
Brothers went on to write, “The human ear is remarkably sensitive to temporal variations and can distinguish subtle trends. By translating data into sound, data sonification allows us to perceive patterns and dynamics that might not be obvious using traditional visualization techniques.” This statement really caught my eye (or ear). For years, climate scientists and communicators have created visualizations to “clearly” reveal alarming trends. However, “clearly” is in the eye of the beholder. Many things obvious to me as a scientist slide right past many people, including science-attentive consumers. Brothers believes that data sonification provides another toolkit for translating complex datasets to the public and even those with visual impairments.
CHORNOBYL, UKRAINE – AUGUST 17: A “frisker” Geiger counter used to measure radiation shows a reading of 1240 counts, approximately 20 times higher than normal, on the paws of an anesthetized stray female dog at a makeshift veterinary clinic operated by The Dogs of Chernobyl initiative inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone on August 17, 2017 in Chornobyl, Ukraine. An estimated 900 stray dogs live in the exclusion zone, many of them likely the descendants of dogs left behind following the mass evacuation of residents in the aftermath of the 1986 nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. Volunteers, including veterinarians and radiation experts from around the world, are participating in an initiative called The Dogs of Chernobyl, launched by the non-profit Clean Futures Fund. Participants capture the dogs, study their radiation exposure, vaccinate them against parasites and diseases including rabies, neuter and spay them, tag the dogs and release them again into the exclusion zone. Some dogs are also being outfitted with special collars equipped with radiation sensors and GPS receivers in order to map radiation levels across the zone. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
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If you are familiar with any movie that involve radiation detection, then you have probably seen a Geiger counter. Brothers says the detector, invented in 1908, is one of the earliest forms of data sonification. However, current technology has enabled new applications and innovations. According to Brothers, there are two approaches to producing data sonification.
- Rendering data as continuous waveform, with adjustments, to fall within our hearing range
- Converting the data (“quantizing”) so that it can be represented as musical notes.
Brothers explored how climate change sounds by pairing a typical visualization with sonification of global, land-based temperature anomalies. He used the second method explained with great detail in his blog to produce the climate sonification. You can listen to a recent version at this link. According to Brothers’ YouTube Page, “The deviations are measured using the average temperature from 1950 to 1980 as a baseline. In this version, each note (and point on the graph) represents one year. The opening bell sound at 1750 occurs again at 1850 and 1950.”
Trends in land-based temperature anomalies. Data source: Berkeley Earth.
Harlan Brothers
I played the clarinet in grade school and love Depeche Mode, but beyond those two things, the details of the transformation extend beyond my skillsets. However, what Brothers is trying to accomplish strongly resonates with me. I have spent much of my career conducting scientific research and advancing weather-climate technology. That’s been the easy part. What I find more challenging is translating “so what?” to a public that often dismisses, minimizes, or oversimplifies things that seem complex, unfamiliar, or beyond their perceived levels of control.
Brothers told me in a direct message, “My hope is that the work can help folks feel what’s happening to our planet.” Psychology concepts like illusory truth effect and mere exposure effect are relevant to Brothers’ premise. Illusory truth effect is when people believe something is true after multiple or repetitive experiences. Mere exposure effect also tells us that people often prefer things because they are familiar with them. A 2024 study in the journal Global Environmental Change pointed out that people who experience certain extreme weather events have a higher sensitivity and acceptance of climate change. Feeling and experience often trump rational, objective data and reasoning, and Brothers understands that.
At the end of our discussion, he told me, “Should art, music and science converge? – I think they are already converging.” As we move forward, the next frontier of science discovery and societal solutions will include scientists, humanists, artists, musicians, engineers, and anyone curious about the world around them.
One of my favorite bands is OMD, and I recently shared their amazing song Anthropocene with my colleague John Knox. I want to thank John for sharing Harlan Brothers with me. He is truly a visionary and like me, increasingly allergic to disciplinary silos.
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