ByMarshall Shepherd,
Senior Contributor.
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.
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 fractal 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.
