Green World: Prof. Peter Terezakis • OART-UT 1057 • NYU Tisch

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Owen O’Leary: Understanding the Climate Crisis Through Music

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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Ethics V. Corporate/Management Ethics

"The 1971 Ford Pinto was rushed into production to fight imported sub-compact cars. In the 1960s and 1970s, the typical car took 43 months to design and build; the Pinto had just 25. It quickly became obvious that corners were cut.... "
Did Pintos really explode in the 1970s?

State Bar of Georgia
Ford Motor Company became the first American corporation to be criminally prosecuted when it was charged with reckless homicide. Three girls died in a fire after their Ford Pinto was struck in the rear and burst into flames; their families claimed that the fire was attributable to the Pinto’s faulty fuel tank design. Although it was acquitted of the criminal charges, Ford paid damages totaling well over $100 million in civil suits arising from explosions of Pinto fuel tanks; recalled 1.5 million Pintos; and ceased production of the car. This animated video is part of the Virtual Museum of Law, presented by the State Bar of Georgia’s Law-Related Education Program and funded by the Cornerstones of Freedom® program.
Mark Dowie, the dogged investigator who broke the story of the Ford Pinto's exploding gas tanks way back in 1977, was then Mother Jones' business manager. A sobering tale, it charges that the Ford Motor Company ignored evidence that an $11 plastic tray could have prevented its cars from bursting into flames (and killing at least 27 people). It was Dowie's first big story for the magazine, published after a six-month investigation.
40 Years After the Pinto’s Debut, Remembering its Exploding Gas Tanks • Jim Motavalli | Mar 24, 2011

Pinto Madness A Mother Jones Classic: For seven years the Ford Motor Company sold cars in which it knew hundreds of people would needlessly burn to death.

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Fair Use – Public Domain

Your student is asking great questions! Not all of the digitized historical objects found in the Internet Archive (and all over the internet really) are in the public domain, so it’s a good idea to check. 
 
The way I check is usually with the help of the Cornell Public Domain Chart (created by Peter Hirtle). This chart walks you through the major factors that go into determining whether something is in copyright or in the public domain. Here’s how I would go about checking:
  • I know that Put Your Head on my Shoulder by Paul Anka was first recorded in 1958/1959. I would scroll to the chart section with the red title “Works Registered or First Published in the US.” Each section is organized by date of publication. (I’m going to make an assumption that the video was also created 1958/1959; if it wasn’t, you might need to consider copyright in the underlying song, and copyright in the video recording itself).
  • I would look in the “Date of Publication” column at the left, and scroll down to the 3 rows that encompass the 1958 time period, “1925-1977,” and “1925-1963.”
  • In the next column over for those rows, I can see that, for that time period, it was required for works to be published with “notice” (which refers to a note showing that the work was copyrighted), and the copyright needed to be renewed in order to stay protected for a longer period of time. I can’t truly see from the Internet Archive page whether or not the recording was published “with notice” or not, but I can look to see if there’s a record of copyright registration and renewal in the Copyright Office’s catalog of copyright registrations & renewals.
  • From searching the Copyright Office’s catalog, I see that the copyright was registered in 1959 and renewed in 1986. 
  • So going back into the chart, I choose the row that has “1925-1963” for date of publication, and “published with notice and copyright was renewed” in the next row over. I see at the end of this row that things in this category become public domain 95 years after the publication date; for Put Your Head on my Shoulder, that will be in 2054.
I hope that this helps. 

—

Anastasia Chiu 

NYU Libraries, located on Lenapehoking 
Pronouns: they/them/theirs

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Nanoparticles and microplastics in the human body

 

Nanoparticles enter the brain via filaments (nerve endings) of the olfactory bulb.
Nanoparticles enter the brain via filaments (nerve endings) of the olfactory bulb, a cranial nerve • Image Source: Wikimedia Commons Patrick J. Lynch
Toxic air pollution particles found in human brains

Air pollution nanoparticles linked to brain cancer for first time

Billions of air pollution particles found in hearts of city dwellers

Microplastic particles now discoverable in human organs

Revealed: microplastic pollution is raining down on city dwellers

Plastic fibres found in tap water around the world, study reveals

People eat at least 50,000 plastic particles a year, study finds

Mussels lose grip when exposed to microplastics – study

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National Online Privacy Test

Online privacy and security are more important than ever.

Check Your Online Security and Privacy IQ Take this short test to get your personal digital security score and contribute to the national score of your country.

The National Privacy Test (NPT) is a digital security campaign that promotes cybersecurity and privacy among Internet users around the world. We seek to educate the general public about cyber threats and the importance of data and information security in the digital age. The objective of this research is to determine the global level of awareness about online security and privacy as well as to provide practical advice.
The NPT research started on March 23, 2017, via an online survey of adult Facebook users, mainly targeting the English-speaking populations from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. At the end of the first stage, 4,636 respondents have completed the survey, with an average score of 48%.