No one said it better than Danish author Hans Christian Anderson: “when words fail, music speaks”. And this is exactly what The Guardian have taken to heart, with the release of a music video composed from 150 years of data related to global temperatures. Using a simple formula: the higher the temperature the higher the pitch (with the volume of each note decided by the amount of carbon in the atmosphere), the eerie work was created to build awareness of the dangers of global warming:

This isn’t the first time “ data sonification ” has been used to explain climate change; in 2013 cellist Daniel Crawford released A Song of Our Warning Planet also using temperature data in a similar process which you can read about here.

Crawford went on to release another video in May last year, this time separating readings from different areas into notation for the different instruments of a string quartet.

We can only hope that music helps carry the message so many still need to hear.

[via Open Culture & The Guardian]