What if you could hear everything? Sound waves aren’t rings, they’re spheres, spheres with pressure in one dimension and time in the other. And just because you don’t hear anything below 20 hurts doesn’t mean nobody else does. If you’re an elephant, you can hear down to around 15 hertz. And if you’re a pigeon, you can hear as low as 0.5 hertz. That’s not a note, that’s closer to a heartbeat. And if you could hear even lower, whole new things come into focus. 1 cycle per minute is weather. 1 cycle per hour is the tides. And 1 cycle per year is the seasons. That’s a frequency. This is Manhattan, the weather, represented in one note. All I need is a number that changes over time. The temperature. If each day is a grain of sound, then a year is a note from a 365-grain granular synthesizer. Each grain carries the energy of that day. The hotter the temperature, the higher the pitch. If I play a year in one second, the lowest temperature maps to 40 Hz and the highest to 4,000 Hz. That’s a range of about 6 and a half octaves. And here are the last 84 years of weather in New York City, played back in 84 seconds. Listen for the storms. Their energy is the length of each grain. And their frequency can be heard as a rhythm. And if you listen closely, you can hear the climate change. Every decade getting just a little bit brighter.
▶
