A college student composed a string quartet that depicts the rising temperatures of the Northern Hemisphere over the last 135 years.
Dan Crawford’s “Planetary Bands, Warming World” uses temperature data from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Science going back to 1880. Each musician is assigned to a region of the Northern Hemisphere.
“The cello matches the temperature of the equatorial zone. The viola tracks the mid latitudes. The two violins separately follow temperatures in the high latitudes and in the arctic,” said Crawford.
The pitch of each note follows average annual temperatures in the regions — the higher the note, the warmer the year. The low C note on the cello, for instance, is matched to –0.47 °C, which was recorded in 1909, according to Smithsonian magazine.
“We often think of the sciences and the arts as completely separate — almost like opposites, but using music to share these data is just as scientifically valid as plotting lines on a graph,” Crawford said in the description of the video on YouTube.
“Listening to the violin climb almost the entire range of the instrument is incredibly effective at illustrating the magnitude of change — particularly in the Arctic which has warmed more than any other part of the planet.”
The geography student wrote the piece with his professor, Scott St. George. The two in 2013 also wrote a solo cello piece on global warming, called “A Song of Our Warming Planet.”
The average surface temperature of the Earth has risen 1.4 degrees since 1880, NASA said earlier this year, noting that 2014 was the hottest year on record.
