Sonification of Warming Stripes

We present a sonification of the temperature anomalies (deviations from an average, reference value) on the Earth’s near-surface over the period 1930–2024. The sonification is combined with the famous “Warming Stripes” visualisation to create an animated audio-visual. Similarly to the visualisation, the sonification is designed to create a sense of urgency and an appreciation of the gravity of the situation of ever-increasing temperatures. A synthetic mix of sounds is used, which is modified so that with increasing temperature the sound appears to increase in intensity (by modifying a filter cut-off frequency and the amplitude) and increase in harmonic tension (by modifying relative pitches). To represent the passage of time, there’s an additional ‘tick’ for each year of the data, which also could be interpreted as an ominous countdown to disaster. It is intended as a data journalism piece for general public audiences, with a secondary goal of making an accessible representation of the “Warming Stripes” for those with sight loss. The sonification was produced using the STRAUSS sonification Python package.

Here we release:
1. An article (or README), explaining how the audio-visual was produced: Sonification_Warming_Stripes.pdf

2. The audio file of the resulting sonification: warming_stripes.wav

3. The audio-visual file: warming_stripes.mp4

4. A zip file containing all of the scripts (in the form of Python Jupyter notebooks) that were used to produce the sonification, and the plots for the explanation article (Sonification Warming Stripes.pdf). In this zip file, there is:
4a. The code to make the sonification and visual frames of the audio-visual: Warming_Stripes_Sonification/STRAUSS_Stripes.ipynb
4b. The data used to create the sonification within the code: Warming_Stripes_Sonification/data/HadCRUT.5.0.2.0.analysis.summary_series.global.annual.txt

4c. The base sound samples that were manipulated (within the code) to create the sonification: Warming_Stripes_Sonification/samples/gentleSound_a4.wav and Warming_Stripes_Sonification/samples/powerfulSound_bb1.wav
4d. The code used to make the spectrogram figures shown in Sonification_Warming_Stripes.pdf: Warming_Stripes_Spectrogram/Spectrograms.ipynb
4e. Mono versions of the three audio files required to make the spectrograms (created by merging the original stereo
files): Warming_Stripes_Spectrogram/warming_stripes_audio_mono.wav and Warming_Stripes_Spectrogram/gentleSound_a4_mono.wav and Warming_Stripes_Spectrogram/powerfulSound_bb1_mono.wav.

Version Notes -
Version 2 (21/12/24): Fixed an issue with panning the sounds. In Version 1 all sounds were panned, whilst in Version 2 only the tick sound in panned. All codes and outputs corrected, accordingly.