Rachel Shin- LO4

Weather Thingy – Real time climate sound controller

In 2018, Adrien Kaeser developed a computation system that linked climate and music to produce a variation of sounds according to the change in climate. Kaeser developed this system with Arduino, Weather Meters, environment sensor, C++ coding, and MIDI, allowing him to configure a connection between climate and sound production.

As someone with a musical background, I admired how Kaeser took the time to configure each component of music and audience experience to a certain climate factor. He altered the panning, delay, and frequency according to the change in wind, UV sensor, and wind speed respectively. I appreciated this project particularly because it allowed Kaeser to encourage listeners to adopt a different musical style in contrary to the conventional pop, lo-fi, and rap styles taken today. I suppose that the algorithms used to generate the work came from creating two platforms of which one was made to visually represent a soundscape while the other produced configured sound variations based off of the visualized soundscape. The two were then linked with coding and sensors to produce this “Weather Thingy.” The creator’s artistic sensibilities manifested in the final form by controlling and modifying music and sound production by a console and interface that translates climate data into a visual representation of sound.