Transcript

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[WATER DRIPPING]

DANIEL CRAWFORD:

I was in a class with Professor Scott St. George in the geography department and at one point, he posted a slide advertising for interns in his dendrochronology lab. And I was lucky enough to get that job.

He came to me with a set of data with the task of turning it into a piece of music, and we wound up with "A Song of Our Warming Planet." In the piece of music, each note will correspond to a year. And then the pitch of that note will represent the temperature of that year. So then for these really high pitches, that would mean a warmer year and then the lower pitches would be a cooler year.

The data comes from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA. It's a compilation of global annual surface air temperatures. Climate scientists have a standard toolbox to communicate their data, and what we're trying to do is we're trying to add another tool to that toolbox; another way to communicate these ideas to the people who might get more out of this than out of maps, graphs, and numbers.

Climate change is a defining issue of our generation, and it's still something that a lot of people don't fully understand. And what we're trying to do is to represent with the music, sort of, the immediacy and the importance that this issue has right now. And if we act on that, then maybe it won't be as much of an issue for the future.

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[MUSIC - DANIEL CRAWFORD AND SCOTT ST. GEORGE, “A SONG OF OUR WARMING PLANET”]

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