Lake effect: Turning water into sound

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By Chris Symons

Art and science are commonly thought of as polar opposites. But who says you can’t have cake and listen to it, too?

An innovative method of analyzing data provides a new perspective on environmental information. Sonification is the process of turning numerical, physical and visual data into sound and music.

I decided to give it a try with some Great Lakes data. But first, some background.

One purpose of data sonification is to provide alternatives for people who can’t see, said Bruce Walker, a professor of Interactive Computing and Psychology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. For example, blind students could read and understand correlations in a graph if they were played as sound for them.

“The auditory system is the best pattern recognition system we know of,” Walker said.

Walker completed his doctoral dissertation on sonification and now heads the Georgia Tech Sonification Lab. One of the most critical parts to shaping each sonification project is the message the data and the presentation method are supposed to present, he said.

“It all boils down to what I call communicative intent,” Walker said. “What are you trying to convey?”

Environmental data in particular are enticing scientists and musicians as a means to demonstrate and convey information in a new way.

Robert Alexander, a doctoral candidate in design science at the University of Michigan, has taught scientists at a NASA center in Maryland how to use sonification to observe satellite data. He is part of the Solar Heliospheric Research Group at the University of Michigan, where he used audification, a type of sonification, to analyze solar wind anomalies.

It gets pretty technical, but he recently produced a video to succinctly explain it:

More recently, Alexander helped create the music for a dance performance using wind speed and wind altitude, recorded from a buoy in Lake Michigan. The purpose behind this performance was to communicate the movement and value of renewable value of wind energy.

The intended message of the data is an important step in the sonification process, Alexander said. Every little decision can have a large impact on how your project takes shape. Even the decision to put data points onto a traditional scale can potentially shrink the data from 64 thousand units down to 64 notes, Alexander said.

“It’s the data that is telling the story,” Alexander said. “It’s a question of ‘how can I really come to understand what the data is saying?’ Then I can facilitate that story in the best way possible.”

German artist and musician Bartholomaus Traubeck was inspired to take thin cross sections of tree rings, and place them on a modified vinyl record player. He realized each year’s ring is different, and irregularities in the tree rings could represent different patterns and events in the tree’s life. The record player plays the tree rings as it would a vinyl disc. In my view, the result is beautiful.

In an interview with Urban Times, Traubeck said he enjoys the mixing of nature and technology, which he thinks many people see as opposites. His work with tree ring sonification, allows people to hear the “patterns that form through an aging process in different environments,” Traubeck said.

I was so excited by the prospect of listening to environmental data, I decided to give it a try myself.

I asked Stacey Fox, the transdisciplinary artist-in-residence at Michigan State University’s School of Journalism, to help me create my own sonified data set from Great Lakes water level information.

Fox, who has a master’s degree in solo performance percussion, has experience “playing water,” as she calls it, and encouraged me to physically record and perform my graphs, instead of using a computer program.

Fox helped me to select the sounds I would use, demonstrating how she would hit, scoop, splash, and manipulate water to create different tones and sounds, and encouraged me to try some sounds of my own. She also advised me to use data that has a degree of variability, to allow for more diverse sound.

Remembering that a time element worked well with sonification, I used water level and precipitation charts of Lake Michigan and Lake Huron from the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory.

Data points of average monthly water levels of Great Lakes looks a lot like notes on a music staff. Image: Army Corps of Engineers

Data points of average monthly water levels of the Great Lakes look a lot like notes on a music staff. Image: Army Corps of Engineers

Lake Michigan and Lake Huron are technically the same lake, which is why their water levels and precipitation are charted the same. I turned each monthly average water level increment of the graph into a different line on the musical staff, with a corresponding note for each. The passing years served as my metronome, driving the notes forward.

The process was trying, and required adjustment along the way. I played on a keyboard the notes I had transposed from the line graphs of precipitation and water levels and recorded them in a studio at East Lansing’s WKAR radio station. I used special effects of water dripping onto different surfaces, sloshing and tinkling in glass bottles, and hitting the bottles when filled with different amounts of water.

I used audio software to edit the sounds all together. The water levels were on piano, and the precipitation was edited to sound like orchestral strings. Typically the strings and piano follow each other, up and down, because of the correlation. But when the year reaches 2000, they go to opposite extremes, breaking the correlation.

I also used glass bottles, which I tuned with water to sound higher and lower than the note that was the long term average line. I played the lower of the glass bottles when the water level of that year dropped below the long term average line. The higher toned bottle was for when the water levels rose above it.

I played splash and droplet sounds at the passing of every 10 years and when a drastic shift occurred in the water levels either way.

Since about 1999, Great Lakes water levels were the lowest they’ve been since the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, according to data provided by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. I tried to accent notes that marked drastic changes in the water level, and in particular the notes occurring after 2000, when the significant low was most prominent.

It is worth noting that the graphs I used stopped at 2013. That meant they did not reflect the most recent data on Great Lakes water levels, which shows them rising back closer to normal.

To reflect this recovery, I closed my piece by inflecting the last note upward as it trails out.

My first effort, with all notes and sound effects, sounded like this:

But upon completion of the piece, I decided to drop most of the sound effects. They seemed too gimmicky, and the message was jumbled and unclear.

I created another version with only the keyboard water levels, accompanied by blowing across bottles when the water levels got particularly above or below the long term average line. That ended up sounding like this:

Then I remembered what Walker, Alexander and Fox said. I realized I needed a clearer message to my work. My original purpose was to turn data into sound, to try my hand at sonification and not convince or demonstrate a point.

That realization led me to strip away all of the special effects and additional notes. I brought the work back to the bare bones I had started with – the changing water levels. And I demonstrated that given a graph, I could turn it into sound.
Here is that simplified version:

So, what do you think? How did I do? Is this a new way to convey environmental data, or is it purely art?

What sort of data would you like to see sonified? Tell us in the comments or give it a go yourself!

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