Listen In takes actual water and weather data gathered at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and converts it into music. This process of representing data with sound is called “data sonification”.
The Hubbard Brook sonifications assign specific elements of water data to specific musical instruments, creating a forest symphony. The listener can hear the quantities of water moving through the forest as precipitation, stream flow, soil water, evaporation, and transpiration. Several drivers of the water cycle, including air temperature and wind, also play a part in the music. Sonifications, unlike charts and graphs, engage different neural circuitry in our brains than the visual and reasoning centers. In other words, sonifications allow us to process scientific data in new and exciting ways.
Enjoy past Hubbard Brook data-as-music in the Music Library, or listen to what’s currently happening at Hubbard Brook on Music Now.
Sonifications of hydrometeorological data from the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest were developed by Marty Quinn of Design Rhythmics Sonification Research Lab.
Listen to Past Years - The audio files below contain yearly data from 2010 through 2014. In these examples, each hour of data corresponds to 100 milliseconds of music.
Listen to individual years of data, or play back several years of forest hydrology at Hubbard Brook.
Visit the AUDIO KEY to see what each musical instrument represents.
Listen to the Most Current Hour of Data - Music Now sonifies the most recent hour of water and weather data at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, NH. This hour of music represents a single line of data, with one value for each data element (e.g. precipitation, streamflow). To create an intricate musical interpretation of a single hour of data (from these individual values), Music Now varies the tempo of the music based on stream flow data and the time signature of the music based on air pressure data.
A Combined WaterViz and Sonification - In this example, hydrologic data collected at Hubbard Brook are used to create both a visualization and a sonification for mid-June through August 2015. The data are played back at the rate of 200ms per hourly data point. The audio key will appear occasionally throughout the video.