sonify-viz
Listening to rivers, oceans and climate: a learning workbench for data sonification
A learning project and a starting scaffold · Graham Watt and Claude Code
These are pieces of music made from real environmental records: river gauges, weather stations, satellites, fish counts, storm tracks and the Keeling curve. Slow signals set the harmony, and faster ones set rhythm, texture and short motifs. Every sound is tagged by whether its data were retrieved, derived or simulated.
This is a first scaffold, not a finished instrument. An interdisciplinary planner brought the questions, the rivers and the domain knowledge. An AI coding agent led the music theory and wrote the code. How this was made sets out who did what.
Pieces
Water Year Rings
One hydrologic year, October 2023 to September 2024, in two southern British Columbia watersheds: the Granby River and the Okanagan. About 7 minutes each, recorded acoustic instruments, with a synced tree-ring page.
Climate Pair
Sixty-eight years, 1958 to 2025, one year per bar. CO₂, ocean heat, ENSO and a century of storm tracks, heard from the Pacific and from the Atlantic. About 8 minutes each; strings, organ, timpani and synthesizers.
Meridian Chorus
Thirteen voices on the 100th meridian, one every 15 degrees from the North Pole to the South Pole, sing one year from the December 2023 solstice to the December 2024 solstice. Each voice sounds while its sun is up, and every voice shares one noon. Air temperature colours the organ, the sea sings on its own floor below, and sea ice quiets it. About 16 minutes in four movements; a 7-minute daylight-only version is kept beside it. A work in progress: the territory acknowledgements for its land voices are still being prepared.
Superior Ice Year
One ice season on Lake Superior, Gichigami, from 1 November 2025 to 15 June 2026. The lake is cut into eight regions and each is a voice, west lowest and east highest, so the chord is the ice pattern on the map. Water, air, sunlight, wind, snow, rain and birds each add an instrument, a quiet ghost tone follows the median year of 2008 to 2025, and freeze and breakup sound as glass pings and low drops. About 12 minutes in four movements; a 6-minute version is kept beside it.
Flow Regimes
Four water years of interior British Columbia, sorted by when the freshet comes and how dry the summer gets, each given a drum voice that reads its own year’s river. They enter one at a time over the same October-to-September cycle, on cycles of 9, 7, 5 and 3 steps against a steady beat, while snowpack opens a filter and snowmelt wakes a harp and marimba. Nine minutes, drum-led, an evocation of a style rather than a copy of any record.
Arctic Round
Forty-eight years of Arctic sea ice, October 1978 to September 2026, one ice year per bar, as a set of pieces. The Wheel, a variant, is ready first: eight organ notes turn in a fixed order, one a week, and the total ice extent decides how many can sound, eight in a full March and two at the 2012 record low. A cello follows ice volume, open water brightens the room, and a map of the ice runs on the same clock. Thirteen minutes, cello and organ. The Round, the main piece, is in preparation.
Godbout Outlook
A 15-day weather forecast for Godbout, Quebec, from a frozen run of ECMWF’s AI model, one bar for every six hours at 126 beats a minute. The sun sets the pulse, rain and snow bring in the full kit, wind drives the congas and cello, and falling pressure sinks the drone and brings in a deep baritone sax. A storm of snow opens the run and one of rain closes it. Two minutes, drum-led, weather appreciation rather than a forecast.
2424/461
2,424 lightning flashes in 461 minutes over the Cariboo and Chilcotin, on the afternoon and evening of 30 June 2021, from the GOES-17 satellite. A pin follows the storm (or goes where you put it), each flash within reach is a drum hit placed by its distance and direction, and the weather at the pin plays the strings, flute, organ, tuba and bear sax. It runs in the browser, from a few minutes to half an hour, with a dashboard view for a big screen.
Every track has a card with its version, its records, what drives each sound, what to be careful about, and how to check it byte for byte: see Tracks.
The code
Everything is open: the data fetching, the instrument engine, the scores and this site. It’s all on GitHub, under the Mozilla Public License 2.0. Each piece’s page lists its data sources and licences.