Water Year Rings

One hydrologic year in two southern British Columbia watersheds, played by acoustic instruments

Water year 2024 · October 1, 2023 to September 30, 2024

These are two pieces of music built from river gauges, weather stations, satellite plant-productivity data and fish counts. Every three days of data becomes one bar of music. Rising flow thickens the piano. Ice forming on the river brings in a falling glockenspiel and a bowed cymbal. Sockeye passing a dam climb the marimba. Nothing is a simple value-to-pitch beep: slow signals set the harmony, and faster ones set rhythm, texture and short motifs.

Listen with the synced visual →

The two pieces

Granby River

Grand Forks, BC · key of D · 6:57

A warm El Niño winter. The gauge flagged ice on only 28 days, in broken spells, and the spring freshet came early and small: 147 m³/s, against 465 in the 2010–24 record.

Okanagan

Okanagan Lake and River · key of F · 7:50

A drought year on the lake, which rose only 0.7 m. It was also the biggest sockeye return in ten years of Wells Dam counts.

How to read this site

  • Listen shows each piece as tree rings: one ring per record, filling clockwise from October as the music plays, with a live readout of the date, the harmony and which instruments are sounding.
  • Methods & code explains every mapping from data to sound, the music theory behind the harmony, the quality checks, and the full source code.

Credits and licences

Data from the Water Survey of Canada and Environment and Climate Change Canada (contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada), NASA MODIS via the ORNL DAAC, and Columbia River DART (Columbia Basin Research, University of Washington; Wells Dam data courtesy of Douglas County PUD). Instruments from VSCO 2 Community Edition (Versilian Studios, CC0). Bird recordings from Wikimedia Commons, credited on the Methods page. Because the bird recordings are CC BY-SA, the rendered audio is released under CC BY-SA 4.0. The code is under the Mozilla Public License 2.0.

Who did what is set out on How this was made: Graham Watt brought the question, the rivers and the domain knowledge; Claude Code led the music theory and wrote the code.