Significant progress has been made in climate science communications in recent years. The majority of Americans now accept climate change as an urgent threat to life on Earth. The major problem that lies at hand is convincing those who do understand the profundity of potential effects to take action and change their behaviors to mitigate impacts. Communications research findings have suggested that techniques that develop information into a narrative format particularly involving emotion can bring the often abstract concept of climate change to a personal level and therefore have the potential to provoke political and social action.
Data sonification, a technique that translates numerical scientific information into non-speech sound has the potential to effectively communicate scientific findings to a broad audience. The purpose of this investigation was to examine a case study environmental data sonification by ecologist Lauren Oakes and environmental neuroeconomist Nik Sawe to determine whether the sonification was effective and which elements contributed to its communicative successes. Effectiveness was examined using interviews, reception information, and ecomusicological methodologies.
Results/Conclusions
Findings indicate that the sonification created by Oakes and Sawe communicated both the quantifiable effects of climate change on Alaskan forest population dynamics and the less tangible emotional and cultural impacts of forest restructuring. Their sonification went viral on a small scale, and through this substantial dissemination sparked an online discourse about the effects of climate change and the role of humans in their mitigation. Reception analysis demonstrated that the press understood the sonification as a hybrid scientific and artistic product, which reveals the ambiguous disciplinary classification of sonification techniques.
While this ambiguity highlights a tension between the typically disparate approaches and methodologies of scientific and artistic intellectual pursuits, the characteristics of the technique that make it disciplinarily ambiguous are also those that give it potential as an effective science communication tool. Sonifications blend the logic and epistemological privilege of traditional science communication with the persuasive aesthetically-oriented and emotional benefits of sound as a medium. Sonifications are themselves a useful technique, but also have broader implications as models for the interdisciplinary collaborations that are increasingly necessary as we navigate our rapidly changing world.