This. Is. Awesome.
There is some real beauty in watching the clouds roll in and blot out the lights of this Greek City.
Of strings and cooler climes
Everyone has heard of the fabled tones of the musical instruments created in the late 17th and early 18th century CE by Antonius Stradivarius, and many attempts have been made over the centuries since to build instruments that replicate his sound and find the fabled 'secret ingredient' of the Cremona instrument makers, whether in the wood curing or the varnish. The task may well be impossible; it turns out that his 600 or so surviving instruments (violins, guitars, violas, and cellos) are unique because of the climate of that terrible century, that fell in the middle of the period known as the little ice age (see Little ice age http://on.fb.me/1j3khlF).
While the cause is still being debated (options include fluctuations in solar output, characterised by a period with few or no sunspots known as the Maunder Minimum and reductions in atmospheric CO2 due to the depopulation of the Americas by disease in the previous century), the tree rings in the wood he used to build his instruments show a characteristic pattern due to the unique climatic conditions of the time.
Trees produce narrower annual growth rings in these cooler conditions. They usually vary in width along with the annual climate variations, and have been used as proxies in many climate studies, recording everything from drought cycles in the American west to the Warm medieval Period in Europe. The prolonged cold during the 17th century resulted in a long succession of narrow dense rings with little variation due to the poor growing conditions (with long winters and cool summers), making for unusually dense wood with exceptional acoustic qualities, resulting in the deep resonances in his unique sound. Such conditions have not recurred since, making these pieces irreproducible.
Loz
Image credit, a violin at the Royal Palace, Madrid: Σπάρτακος, frost fair on the Thames: Thomas Wyke http://bit.ly/1NERBeZ http://bit.ly/1jMV2UW http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/violins/en/ http://bbc.in/1QdLEbo
Source: facebook.com
A student from the University of Minnesota organizes 4 other students in a string quartet that gives the “music of climate change”. This is so creative that I’m just going to quote their description:
In 2013, the composition “A Song of Our Warming Planet” transformed 133 years of global temperature measurements into a haunting melody for the cello. Following its release, A Song of Our Warming Planet was featured by The New York Times, Slate, the Weather Channel, National Public Radio, io9, The Huffington Post and many others on its way to becoming a viral sensation and reaching audiences around the globe. Now the co-creators, University of Minnesota undergraduate Daniel Crawford and geography professor Scott St. George, are back with a new composition that uses music to highlight the places where climate is changing most rapidly. Based on surface temperature analysis from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the composition "Planetary Bands, Warming World" uses music to create a visceral encounter with more than a century’s worth of weather data collected across the northern half of the planet. (The specific dataset used as the foundation of the composition was the Combined Land-Surface Air and Sea-Surface Water Temperature Anomalies Zonal annual means.) Crawford composed the piece featuring performance by students Julian Maddox, Jason Shu, Alastair Witherspoon and Nygel Witherspoon from the University of Minnesota’s School of Music. As Crawford explains in the video, “Each instrument represents a specific part of the Northern Hemisphere. The cello matches the temperature of the equatorial zone. The viola tracks the mid latitudes. The two violins separately follow temperatures in the high latitudes and in the arctic.” The pitch of each note is tuned to the average annual temperature in each region, so low notes represent cold years and high notes represent warm years. Crawford and St. George decided to focus on northern latitudes to highlight the exceptional rate of change in the Arctic. St. George says the duo plans to write music representing the southern half of the planet, too, but haven’t done so yet. Through music, the composition bridges the divide between logic and emotion, St. George says. “We often think of the sciences and the arts as completely separate — almost like opposites, but using music to share these data is just as scientifically valid as plotting lines on a graph,” he says. “Listening to the violin climb almost the entire range of the instrument is incredibly effective at illustrating the magnitude of change — particularly in the Arctic which has warmed more than any other part of the planet.”