Granby River
Hover over (or tap) a ring or a lane of the score for its value on any day. Values are the daily numbers the piece played from; gaps of a day or two in a gauge record are filled by interpolation.
The score
Data on top, sound underneath. Each blue lane is a record; each orange lane is how loud that instrument group plays at that moment. When a record moves, its instrument should move with it. Click anywhere to jump there.
Listening guide
Moments to listen for, placed automatically from the data. Grey lines are changes of mode or hydrologic phase.
How the harmony moves
A mode is a set of seven notes. Arranged from dark to bright, each mode differs from its neighbour by exactly one note (in gold), so one step along the ladder is the smallest change of mood music can make. The season sets how bright the mode is. The year's departure from its 15-year normal nudges it one step darker or brighter. The mode can change only once every eight bars.
Phrygian is not used. Its second note sits a half step above the home note and clashes under a sustained piano. The chord on top is written as a Roman numeral: upper case is major, lower case is minor. Each hydrologic phase (dormant, rising, peak, recession, low; or winter, filling, full, drawdown for the lake) has its own four-chord loop.
What drives what
Rings run from the centre outward in this order. R retrieved measurements. D derived from measurements or the calendar. S simulated timing. The simulated layers are modelled from temperature and season, not observed.
| Record | Source | What you hear |
|---|
Sources
Hydrometric: Water Survey of Canada daily means via the ECCC GeoMet OGC API. The Granby ice record is WSC's "Ice Conditions" data flag. Climate: ECCC daily climate (Billings; Summerland CS). Plant productivity: MODIS MOD17A2HGF 8-day gross primary productivity via the ORNL DAAC subset service. Sockeye and water temperature: Wells Dam adult counts, Columbia Basin Research DART. Bird timing uses typical regional arrival windows, not observations.
Instruments: VSCO 2 Community Edition (Versilian Studios, CC0): upright piano, harp, string sections, contrabass, flute, marimba, glockenspiel, hand percussion. Birds, via Wikimedia Commons: Swainson's thrush (Niels Krabbe, CC BY-SA 4.0); American dipper (NPS & MSU Acoustic Atlas / Jennifer Jerrett, public domain); western meadowlark and sandhill crane (Jonathon Jongsma, CC BY-SA); bank swallow (Pascal Christe, CC BY-SA 4.0).