Just before Molly James \u201923 Ph.D. visited South Korea in August, the country had experienced significant flooding, the worst in 80 years, during a monsoon season that caused the Han River to overflow and wash out many areas of Seoul.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a storm that on a graph comparing the country\u2019s daily precipitation in July and August of the last three years shoots a spike significantly higher than other daily records. And for James, it\u2019s a storm that gave pause, as she tried to figure out how to account for it in her latest project \u2013 translating scientific data into song.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis project doesn\u2019t necessarily focus on climate change, but it\u2019s hard not to think about it when you see the graph about rain,\u201d James says. \u201cWhen you analyze a change over time, it\u2019s obvious there are fluctuations that have happened because of climate change. You can see it in the data, and you can hear it in the music.\u201d<\/p>\n
James is a self-described numbers person, who studied physics as an undergraduate and now as a marine sciences<\/a> graduate student at UConn Avery Point<\/a> looks at the hydrodynamics of the salt marsh system and how tides affect creeks and adjacent grasses.<\/p>\n She loves math.<\/p>\n \u201cBut in my college orchestra, the entire trombone section was physicists,\u201d she notes. \u201cI played tuba alongside them, and now I play trombone in the Southeastern Connecticut Community Orchestra<\/a>. Music is all patterning; it\u2019s math. The scales work the left side, the logic side, of your brain.\u201d<\/p>\n James met Hea Youn \u201cSophy\u201d Chung<\/a>, a Julliard School-trained pianist from South Korea, about five years ago and reconnected during the pandemic to practice conversational speaking in each other\u2019s native languages. Chung was impressed with James\u2019 work as an oceanographer and suggested they partner on a different project, one that would combine their strengths.<\/p>\n They decided to use publicly available data from the Korean Meteorological Administration \u2013 the equivalent of the National Weather Service or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the U.S. \u2013 and translate into musical notes various data points, James says, whether temperature or wind speed or another measure.<\/p>\n Chung then tapped the right side, the creative side, of her brain to build chords and melodies to turn each song into a piece that\u2019s pleasant to the ear. A planning grant from the Arts Council Korea<\/a> funded the full project and allowed James to travel to South Korea for 2\u00bd weeks last summer, a trip during which the pair recorded some meteorological data of their own, including temperatures and humidity levels.<\/p>\n \u201cThis project is meant to make people feel more connected to the environment, make people feel more connected to nature,\u201d James says. \u201cLooking at graphs is not something that\u2019s intuitive for most people, but music is a way that you can communicate something, even if it\u2019s very abstract.\u201d<\/p>\n Find a Baseline and Assign It a Note<\/strong><\/p>\n James says one of the best sounding of the five songs is about precipitation, \u201cFlight Cancelled Due to Rain at Gimpo Airport,\u201d the song that took note of that historic monsoon rain.<\/p>\n In writing it, James says, she and Chung assigned the piano\u2019s low D to the rain measurement of zero, times when there was no precipitation. Each added millimeter corresponded to a piano key, with the notes moving up the register to use as many of the instrument\u2019s 88 keys as possible \u2013 30 millimeters of rain equates to the key that\u2019s 30 away from D1.<\/p>\n But the historic August storm recorded at one point 140 millimeters of rain, well off the keyboard.<\/p>\n