CO-DEPENDENT is a collaborative label run by Stephen McEvoy (tuuun, FLUF), Calum Gunn (Conditional) and Casper Gottlieb (GOHV, Disformation). CODE072 is my new release on the label, an EP of music based on sonification of weather data. Historical monthly data is available from the Met Office for various meteorological stations. I picked 5 of the stations with the longest records, going back from December 2017 to January 1853. The datasets include:
- Mean maximum temperature (°C)
- Mean minimum temperature (°C)
- Days of air frost (af)
- Total rainfall (mm)
- Total sunshine duration (hours)
Instead of using min and max temperature, I converted them to average temperature and range in order to get two sets that differed more. Using Mathematica I generated MIDI files by mapping the weather data values to pitch and volume while keeping the note length uniform. These were arranged and edited in Reaper, and were played with RAZOR, Synth1 and General MIDI drums.
The 12 monthly readings and an annual weather cycle means that the data has inherent rhythms. Some of the datasets are correlated – like sunshine and temperature, and some are inversely related – like temperature and frost. Rainfall is the most random. Frost has flat spots with successive zeroes. Different meteorological stations start recording at different times, and there are a few gaps. Below are charts of median temperature, sunshine, rain and air frost (click to view full size).
The first two tracks were included in Belgian radio show L’étranger, #364: http://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/l-etranger/show-364-i-always-nod-out-past-the-00-02-mark/
Aesthetic Complexity 