The fast, strident melody of a cello is the sound of solar radiation. The violin played with short, widely spaced notes represents the irregularity of rainfall. This is revealed by the composition Polar Energy Budget (Polar energy budget) by scientist Hiroto Nagai, who says he has managed to combine his love of music with his work as a geoenvironmentalist. Nagai has created a piece for a string quartet using climate data collected over a 30-year period (1982 to 2022), just the tip of the iceberg of a more ambitious project that invites musicians to create on academic records and disseminate science overcoming emotions over intellectual curiosity.
“With data sonification (the transformation of any type of information into sound) we can discover some anomaly, some strange movement, climate change or global warming. The Earth system follows a seasonal cycle, but it has some randomness that can only be detected through this sonification,” says Nagai by video call from Tokyo. The most common use of audio data representation is heart rate monitors, it also allows you to perceive patterns and monitor an object of study. In the case of Nagai, it was the radiation, precipitation, surface temperature and cloud thickness that occurred at the two poles: the Arctic and the Antarctic.
The also professor in the Department of Geography of Rissho University took the public information available in Google Earth Engine and the Remote Sensing Technology Center in Japan funded the project. He discovered in the process that certain phenomena are naturally related to some sounds: “The sequence 1,366 kilowatts per square meter is very important in science because it is the constant value of solar radiation. That means that solar energy is shortwave radiation. I turned that sequence into the musical scale mi-la-la, which appears in the middle of my piece of music.” That short and abrupt beat is what gives Solar energy budget of drama, tension and disturbing moments.
“I chose a very typical form in Western classical music, which is the string quartet (two violins, a viola and a cello, which emulate a tenor, soprano, alto and baritone), because they are instruments that can be played in many ways. ways only by changing the position of the performer. It also has influences from minimalist music, which is created by compiling small similar and slightly changing fragments,” explains Nagai about his work.
The composition was premiered at Waseda University a year ago, Their study was published last May and new presentations are prepared, a frustrated dream has been surpassed by its author. Because, despite having a doctorate in Environmental Studies and having worked at the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, among other scientific institutions, he always had a passion for music.
Nagai learned to play the piano at the age of four, in high school he played the saxophone and made some musical arrangements. “I wrote very small pieces and no one was interested in my works because they were very typical of academic music.” Now, his music has aroused interest throughout the West and has had an impact mainly in Spain, Italy and Latin America. “I don’t know why Latin people love me, I’m surprised that the Japanese newspapers haven’t been so interested,” he remembers. It is precisely his hobby and knowledge of musical composition that has differentiated his work. of other auditory representations of scientific data that already existmainly those related to astronomy.
Music to spread science
Data sonification has become popular, with examples such as the melody of the Earth’s magnetic field developed by the European Space Agency or that of a supermassive black hole created by NASA. There was even a musical representation of climate data, the work of Daniel Crawford, who created a fragment with cello to count the increase in global temperatures over 135 years.
Climate change was not perceived in the measurements that Nagai made because the time range was too short and the changes were too small to be perceived. Despite these previous experiences, it is the first time that a six-minute composition with a narrative thread has been written based on scientific data.
“Converting science data to music data is very easy. It can be done with a button from my computer algorithm, but it would not have the ability to move emotions. You can Google many works with scientific data on the web, but some are very difficult to continue listening to. A very loud or very quiet sound cannot be music for humans. In the process, I wondered what is recognized as music and what is simply a sound,” says the former guest researcher at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology. Thus, to achieve a pleasant sound, he had to establish a range of melodies and define a range of tones: “It is a process very similar to cooking. You have the raw chicken or meat, but you have to bake it or fry it.”
Despite growing up musically with Bach and Beethoven, it was while listening to electronic music that it occurred to him to musicalize the weather. “The creators of EDM (acronym for the music genre dance) mix any sound, a baby’s cry or a scream, and it made me think about how not very musical noises can be introduced into some works. “Scientific data and music data are both digital data, we deal with both in the same way.” That conviction that numerical registers and composition are related led him to create the Polar Geosonif-i platforma tool that collects all Earth measurements, topographic indicators or temperature change statistics, ready to be converted into musical notes.
Nagai’s belief that music is an ideal medium for disseminating science leads him to mention possible jobs beyond Earth observation. You can measure, he mentions, the decline that some species, such as lions or zebras, has had in a specific space; the before and after of an area contaminated by radiation; or light levels in places affected by war. “Artists do not use a lot of scientific or observational data that can be a source of creation. There are so many efforts from science to make phenomena visible that I hope music can use more and more.”
How to bring science to the field of art? The answer, with more and more followers, is in collaborations. “The simplest way is cooperation between a professional musician or artist and a scientist. This type of work is booming in the international scientific community and large conferences are already being held that include presentations that combine art and science.” The objective: to make a piece of reality exciting and understandable.
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