motile
motile

Climate change and its effects, such as on glacier melt, drought, and extreme flood events, are mostly shown today with tabular or graphical representations of data. What the data show, however, remains interpretable with conventional visualization methods mostly only for scientists. Here we would like to break new ground in presenting environmental data from observations and the continuation of these data strands into the future using climate simulations as an alternative. Environmental data such as temperature with its diurnal variations, river levels, precipitation with its high variability, or data on snow and glacier melt all have their specific signatures. These signatures are being altered by climate change. A fundamental new way of representing these signals of change in environmental data due to climate change would be to algorithmically process the data into auditory signals. Auditory processing should allow listeners without a background in climate science to auditively perceive the action of natural processes in a river basin. In addition, the changes in these processes are to be made “audible” through changes in the auditory signals. In this way, climate change, or rather its effects on the water cycle in Switzerland, should become “tangible”.




motile

c/o

Geographisches Institut
Universität Bern
Hallerstrasse 12
3012 Bern

info@motile.ch


Agenda

Project Detail

Project

Climate Sounds

“Can you hear the waters rising?” The project aims to make the abstract numbers and data of climate research audible.

Climate change and its effects, such as on glacier melt, drought, and extreme flood events, are mostly shown today with tabular or graphical representations of data. What the data show, however, remains interpretable with conventional visualization methods mostly only for scientists. Here we would like to break new ground in presenting environmental data from observations and the continuation of these data strands into the future using climate simulations as an alternative. Environmental data such as temperature with its diurnal variations, river levels, precipitation with its high variability, or data on snow and glacier melt all have their specific signatures. These signatures are being altered by climate change. A fundamental new way of representing these signals of change in environmental data due to climate change would be to algorithmically process the data into auditory signals. Auditory processing should allow listeners without a background in climate science to auditively perceive the action of natural processes in a river basin. In addition, the changes in these processes are to be made “audible” through changes in the auditory signals. In this way, climate change, or rather its effects on the water cycle in Switzerland, should become “tangible”.