What Does Climate Change Sound Like? A New Way to Hear the Planet’s Distress
For decades, scientists have shown alarming graphs of rising temperatures, melting glaciers, and violent storms. But what if you could hear climate change instead of just seeing it? That’s exactly what Harlan Brothers is exploring through a fascinating concept known as data sonification—the transformation of numbers into sound waves. And this is where things get intriguingly controversial: can our ears reveal truths that our eyes sometimes miss?
Many have seen Ed Hawkins’ famous global warming stripes—those haunting bands of blue-to-red gradients that visualize Earth’s accelerating heat. Displayed during the COP26 Climate Conference in Glasgow, they serve as a visual shorthand for global temperature rise. But Brothers is taking this idea further—turning climate data into musical journeys that let us feel what’s happening to our planet.
From Music to Mathematics—and Back Again
Brothers’ story blends the arts and sciences in a way that feels poetic. Trained as a musician at Berklee College of Music, he later returned to academia to study mathematics and eventually worked with the legendary fractal mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot. That fusion of art and logic set the stage for his current work translating climate data into music. Inspired by the visualizations of physicist Vitaliy Kaurov and University of Ottawa researcher Patrick Georges, Brothers began crafting audio experiences that express the urgency of the crisis—one note, one tone, one temperature rise at a time.
So, What Exactly Is Data Sonification?
In his blog, Brothers explains that sonification means turning datasets into audible sound that falls within the range of human hearing. Think of it as data visualization’s musical cousin. It’s so new that most spellcheckers still don’t recognize the word. Yet, as Brothers points out, our ears can pick up subtle timing patterns and fluctuations that even trained eyes might overlook. Through this auditory lens, climate data becomes not just something to analyze, but something to emotionally connect with—especially for those who might struggle to interpret visual graphs or charts.
Seeing Sound, Hearing Trends
The human ear is incredibly sensitive to changes over time. Brothers argues that by encoding data into sound, we open up a new sensory pathway for understanding patterns that might otherwise fade into statistical abstraction. Traditional visualizations appeal mainly to sight and logic, but sound can tap deeper emotions—a factor psychologists know plays a huge role in shaping public perception. Could hearing climate change make more people care about it?
To illustrate his point, Brothers compares his work to early instruments like the Geiger counter, which audibly clicks to indicate radiation levels. That 1908 invention, he notes, was among the first real examples of data sonification. Today, advanced computational tools allow much richer and more nuanced sound mappings. Brothers describes two main ways of doing this:
- Rendering data as a continuous waveform adjusted into our audible frequency range.
- Converting—or “quantizing”—data points into musical notes, where specific values correspond to specific pitches.
Listening to the Planet’s Pulse
Using the second method, Brothers has turned global temperature records into a kind of musical chronicle of climate change. In his composition, each year between 1750 and the present becomes a single note, while the baseline is the 1950–1980 average temperature. The sound begins with a bell tone at 1750 and repeats it at key intervals—1850 and 1950—like milestones in Earth’s warming story. The resulting piece transforms complex datasets into an auditory journey through centuries of environmental change. You can hear one version on his YouTube channel, where numbers become melody and data sings Earth’s distress call.
Why Sound May Succeed Where Charts Fail
As a scientist accustomed to technical detail, the author admits that translating data into public understanding has always been the hardest part. The science itself is straightforward; convincing people to care is not. Brothers’ approach resonates deeply because it bypasses intellectual resistance and reaches people on an emotional level. “My hope is that the work can help folks feel what’s happening to our planet,” he told me.
And psychology backs him up. Phenomena like the illusory truth effect—our tendency to believe information we hear repeatedly—and the mere exposure effect, which increases liking through familiarity, both suggest that repeated emotional exposure through sound could strengthen climate awareness. A 2024 study in Global Environmental Change even found that people who personally experience extreme weather become more accepting of climate science. In other words, emotions often change minds faster than logic.
Where Art Meets Science
At the end of our conversation, Brothers posed a question that lingers: “Should art, music, and science converge?” His answer was simple—“They already are.” And perhaps this is the future of environmental communication: a world where artists, scientists, musicians, and engineers collaborate to help us both understand and feel the data shaping our world.
Fan or not, think about this—what if your favorite song told the story of Earth’s changing climate? Would you listen differently? Or act differently? That’s the challenge Brothers leaves us with.
So what do you think—can music truly make people care about climate change? Or does turning data into art risk oversimplifying the science? Drop your thoughts in the comments. Let’s hear what you feel.