My idea is conceptually simple and responds to ‘sense of place’ by creating a place where listeners will be invited to feel the results of climate change by apprehending accessible sonic representations, which nonetheless offer second-order complexity and tension as the sonic medium interprets ‘tipping elements’ – global warming, rising CO2 levels or ice sheet diminution. I will exploit sound’s advantages, as a phenomenological reality in itself, sound-over-sign, felt somatically, over certain forms of visual media. For example, selected tipping elements (temperature, ice levels) mapped from a given date up to the predicted tipping point (if we do nothing), are scaled appropriately. Shifting frequencies, perceived as pitches, would indicate rising temperature or diminishing ice cover. As tipping points approach, the frequencies reach inaudibility at higher and lower thresholds, descending/ascending beyond perception, though sound might still be felt (as vibration) and differently so for individuals, mirroring how climate change will be experienced differently by populations around the planet. Thus the listener engages with two complex sounds (ie not sine waves) having a strong fundamental frequency, recognisable as shifting pitches. The interaction of such sonic shifts produces artifacts and perturbations, eliciting further interest in the sonic medium, offering analogies with chaotic systems. A more ‘horizontal’ signification might interpret species loss or biodiversity reduction by mapping to the density of sonic events over given time-scales. Complex noise-based timbres might effectively represent various chaotic conditions as tipping points pass. Data scaling ensures that sonifications are meaningfully mapped to critical fields appropriate to the order of human perception and attention – eg, one hour representing the next 10 years (if we do nothing, if we intervene positively), several hours representing the past 50 years until now. A pre-industrial date, when conditions were considered to be ‘balanced’, might be represented by a single pitch bifurcating as changes take place over years, scaled to the listener’s temporal order. Different timbres might represent several fields as climate change analogues drift towards worst-case scenarios.

The underlying idea is similar in all cases – people come to physical, phenomenological understandings about critical changes, sound and silence become conceptually and structurally significant.

My testing methodology, based on psychoacoustics, will ensure that sonic elements easily perceived and understood by listeners. Beyond this lie opportunities for investigating discrete ecological systems (perhaps even local to Balance-Unbalance 2017), choral/instrumental data renditions, mythopoetic investigations into environmental value systems of early Scottish and sub-Arctic populations, multimedia support (for the installations), further collaborations, interactive and educational possibilities, special access for the visually impaired.

Author Biography