Owen O’Leary
Tisch Drama
Senior
Understanding the Climate Crisis Through Music
To the average person, myself included, it can be very difficult to understand the formulas, numbers, and graphs that scientists produce to explain the changes to the patterns identified in relation to the earth. The CO2 levels and rate that ice caps are melting is hard to wrap your brain around especially if it isn’t affecting you directly. How can I as an artist take cold hard mathematical information and turn it into something special, human, and real?
The phrase math is music is something that you’ve likely heard, and it is very true. Almost all music after the invention of chant can be broken down into rhythm and intervals, dividing beats per minute and measuring intervals between notes. Therefore things like statistics and graphs can be synthesized into music. I decided to focus on four particularly outrageous numbers to see how I could transform them into 1 minute songs, and make accompanying videos to post on tiktok.
The first song focuses on the 47 completed environmental policy rollbacks completed under the trump administration. Out of context 47 doesn’t sound like that many so my goal was to recontextualize that number to help understand it more. My plan was to gradually increase the snaps in the song to make the total feel more overwhelming.
The next song focuses on the fact that 2/3rds of North American bird species are at risk of extinction due to climate change. I decided to use the call of the Brown Thrasher and break it down by rhythm and tone. Many beautiful calls like this are at risk of never being heard again due to brush fires and sea levels rising. I identified that the tones fit into the key of G and identified the tempo. I then used several instruments to support the bird call and an organ to mimic and echo the call.
The next song focuses on the melting of the Antarctic Icecaps. This is a statistic that is particularly tricky to conceptualize. My goal was to have a song deteriorate at the same rate as the ice. I used the first graph on this page to change into music. Every measure of the song represents 1 year and every BPM (beat per minute) represents 75 billion metric tons of ice. The tempo slows 2 beats per minute for every measure, therefore the song slows at a rate of 151 metric tons of ice per year.
My final song focuses on CO2 levels in the atmosphere and uses intervals to help humanize the intervals on the graph that can be found here. I placed a musical staff on the graph lines and placed notes on noticeable shifts on the graph. Now you can visually and audibly follow along with this graph, the last note being absurdly high, putting into context how out of control CO2 emissions have become. 
After I created these songs, I called on my friends to help me make fun approachable choreography for the video element of my project. I then uploaded these videos to tiktok to try to reach people. These videos can be found here:
They each were viewed a few hundred times and shared several times. All of the comments were very supportive and I also shared them to my Instagram story where they got a few hundred views. While the tight community I have created responded very well to these videos, they, unfortunately, did not reach a larger audience.
I learned a great deal from this project as far as actual climate change statistics as well as the process of synthesizing math into music. I think it is a skill that I can fine-tune and use in the future. As long as scientists are able to communicate data I will be able to transform it into beautiful music. I think there are both successes and failures in my project. Some successes are: completing the project and fulfilling requirements, both flexing my skills and gaining new ones, reaching several hundred people with my art and message. Some failures are: Not reaching the size audience I anticipated, being unable to post footage for one of my songs. Two things I would do differently next time are, one, making the songs between 15-30 seconds long as opposed to a minute, and two, I would try to make things that had to be explained a little less. That being said I am extremely proud of my work and have grown very much as an artist from this experiment.
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