Climate data collected at the Poles over a period of over 30 years were transformed into a musical composition designed for a string quartet. Hiroto Nagai of the Japanese Rissho University took on the double role of researcher and composer.
Details on how the composition, lasting approximately 6 minutes and performed in 2023 by professional musicians at Waseda University in Tokyo, was developed are published in the journal iScience. The choice to combine graphic and musical representations of data could be, says Nagai, a powerful powerful tool that canrouse emotions and intellectual curiosity in the public. The data used, collected between 1982 and 2022, come from four polar locations: a core site in Greenland, a satellite station in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard and two Japanese research stations in Antarctica. The researcher assigned different data sets to the various instruments, overlapped some passages and also introduced different musical performance techniques, such as pizzicato and staccato, to the composition.