Weather Sonification

Transcription of the video above

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 hertz doesn’t mean nobody else does. If you’re an elephant, you probably hear an octave lower than this, and apparently a pigeon can hear down to about a half of one hertz, which is nearly six octaves below this note.

And if you stop to think about it, you experience changes in air pressure all the time. We just call it weather, and just because you can’t hear it doesn’t mean it’s not sound, so I downloaded some. 84 years of barometric data from the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, the same people who bring you the National Weather Service.

That’s what you’re hearing right now. 84 years of hourly data. That’s about 700,000 data points. Hourly fluctuations sped up exactly 26 octaves. Every second of audio is about two years of barometric data.

To make things interesting, I put it in stereo. You’re hearing New York in the left channel and Boston in the right. Every hurricane, storm, or northeaster is represented here. The low pulsing sound, those are seasons. The pressure changes as the air temperature rises and falls, and that high pitch note, that’s the daily barometric tide.

The real question is what do you do with it? Well, you take a sound that no one has heard before, and you share it.