After roughly 12 weeks, the earth symphony has come to an official end. I think it’s safe to say on behalf of everyone that this has been such an amazing experience and we’re all proud of everything we’ve accomplished over the course of the past few months!
Mikaela’s journal discusses music as a way of communicating data and the importance of conveying to the audience a feeling of hopefulness. However, it is also important for the audience to not feel complacent and like everything’s fine. Therefore, the symphony should sound hopeful so that people feel that not all hope is lost yet also promote a sense of urgency.
Isabelle talks about how she hopes the data will focus on human impacts on the environment. While anthropogenic sources are one of the biggest contributors to climate change, humans have also wildly shaped the world we live in and it is important to recognise those contributions – both good and bad. I think having some human-centric data will bring the symphony full circle and give the audience a glimpse of the roles that humans play and hopefully encourage everyone to do their part as global citizens.
On this note, Mikaela was able to find a dataset on the number of scientific papers written every year which contain “global climate change” or “global warming”. I think data along these lines would be the perfect way to relate the human-centric data to the hopeful but urgent message we are trying to convey.
Overall, this experience has been amazing, and it has been an honour to meet and work with all the amazing people – especially you Tara (if you read this)! This project has been one of a kind and we are all undoubtedly excited to hear the symphony in April!