Fifteen seconds built from real readings. The same data plays two ways: as a finished song, and exactly as the player sounds, with no rounding.
Final version
A short stereo song: eight bars at 128 beats per minute over the chords Am, F, C, G, Am, F, G, Am. The ocean warmth map becomes the melody, rounded to the A natural minor scale and to chord tones on strong beats, with leaps limited to a fifth, an echo and reverb. It rises through the map and settles on the tonic A. Where neighboring ocean cells jump, the melody adds an extra off-beat note, and where they are similar it rests. The brightness of the world night-lights map decides how busy each bar of bass is. Saharan dust coverage swells the chord pad. Every recorded lightning flash is a bright tick at its real time. The arpeggio plucks, the kick, clap and hi-hat pattern, the pumping of the pad and bass with the kick, and the pause in bar seven are added music and do not come from data.
Unchanged version
The same readings with the player's own voices and formulas. The ocean pitch is exact and not rounded to any scale. The brightness note keeps the player's fixed pitch and changes only in loudness, the dust noise uses the player's filter, and the lightning clicks are the player's clicks at their recorded times. There is no pulse.
What the data is
- Melody: the 32 grid cells of the NASA ECCO2 ocean frame, in reading order, warmer color for a higher note (the unchanged version plays 30 of them). SVS 3912
- Bass: the world night-lights frame, the average brightness of each group of four cells picks the bass pattern of each bar (in the unchanged version, one loudness-scaled note). SVS 5313
- Pad and hiss: the share of the Saharan dust plume in each cell, followed across the piece. SVS 5669
- Ticks: 26 optical flashes recorded by NOAA GOES-16 between 00:00:20 and 00:00:35 UTC on 15 July 2023. NOAA NCEI
Arranging the data as a song makes it more pleasant but less exact: the chords, rhythm, drums and rounding to the scale are musical choices, and a note's pitch only shows which scale or chord tone is closest to a reading. Use the player for exact readings and the unchanged version to hear the data as it is.
Every map in the player also has a Play song from this map button that makes a song like the final version from the readings on screen.
Built with AI assistance (OpenAI Codex and Anthropic Claude). See Project notes.