Ammar Hassonjee – Looking Outwards 04

A Real Time Climate Sound Controller

A researcher from ECAL named Adrien Kaeser recently invented a custom sound controller he named “Weather Thingy” in January, 2018 that interprets real-time climate data to adjust the parameters on musical instruments such as a piano. His device is comprised of parts such as a weather station that collects climate data and a controller to the station that translates the weather related data into a data type that can be understood by electronic instruments called midi data.

The artist’s purpose was for anyone engaging the project to be able to listen and feel the real time effects of the weather through their sense of sound based on the compositions the instruments are playing. I admire this project’s goal to take two forms of data that are not commonly related to each other, yet find a way to program an input and conversion of one dataset of weather data to another in sound data. The project allows us to feel the weather using a sense we don’t typically use for that purpose in our sense of hearing.