With YPS funding, the Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM), the Yale School of Public Health, the Yale School of the Environment, the Yale Departments of Music and of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Music Haven partnered to provide a group of New Haven public school students the opportunity to experiment with translating climate-related data from nature into musical compositions, using AI and visual programming.
A performance of their music took place at CCAM in April 2025 at a symposium where the New Haven students were joined by scientists from the University of California, Berkeley; the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior; the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; and Yale.
Matthew Suttor, program manager at CCAM and senior lecturer in theater and performance studies, worked with elementary, middle, and high schoolers over the course of a semester, bringing the software into the classroom so students could test datasets, like annual average temperatures, with different parameters and then listen to the results. They used the software to create compositions that were later performed by their teachers.
No Time to Delay, a violin canon composed by Matthew using NASA’s GISS Surface Temperature Analysis dataset, demonstrates how climate data can be sonified through software. Each year from 1880 to 2022 is rendered as a single note whose pitch reflects the global temperature anomaly. As anomalies rise, the melody climbs across three octaves, while a staggered second violin evokes feedback loops and the lag between land and ocean warming. Music Haven students later reinterpreted the same dataset in Fahrenheit Fiasco, translating the sound of global warming into their own composition.
Music Haven students also worked with empirical flocking datasets on pigeons and jackdaws using GPS and 3D-imaging data to explore how spatial coordinates and movement dynamics could be mapped onto musical parameters. This process produced the compositions Acceptance and the aptly titled Pigeons, offering a tangible way to hear how collective animal behavior translates into sound and making abstract ecological data perceptible. The same software design is now being prototyped to analyze the migratory patterns of swarming chimney swifts above CCAM each year, extending the approach to a local species and linking ecological datasets directly to new compositions.
“It was the most amazing experience,” Judith Lichtman, Susan Dwight Bliss Professor of Epidemiology (Chronic Diseases), told Yale News. “The students were creating music on the fly, but they were also connecting with each other. They were hearing each other. As somebody who’s in the discipline of public health, it made me realize how much more we could do by engaging with a young audience. To tell effective stories about health and communities and environment, you need to engage creative mechanisms. So much of my work has been writing research papers, and they go to my peers and colleagues, but I think to have a very important impact on the community, it’s important to think of other ways to relay information.”
In tandem with the program for New Haven students, Yale undergraduates in Matthew’s course Nature, AI, and Performance collected data from rainfall, birdsong, melting ice, and snowfall, exploring the scientific value of sonification for communicating climate processes. As the project develops, students in New Haven—“experts of their own environment”—will be empowered to capture video and environmental flux data from their surroundings, analyze it, and sonify the results. This work is now expanding to Harvard Forest, where long-term ecological datasets will provide further opportunities to translate environmental change into sound.
“The next step for the project at large is to develop a curriculum. There are already people around the country asking, ‘Where can we get a lesson plan? We want to try it out.’ The content would also work well for community engagement workshops, which we see as having tremendous potential. We’re really excited for that,” said Matthew. “I think this is my life’s work from this point on.”
Original Project Summary:
Music is a universal language that can communicate both time and emotion. Compositions can powerfully depict natural phenomena, such as cyclic systems, climate trends, or mass movements among animals. Its emotional effects may deepen awareness and increase motivation to solve environmental problems. This project will teach New Haven schoolchildren to transform scientific data on natural processes, such as the flight patterns of flocking birds, into musical compositions. It will use mapping and AI tools to turn the birds’ positions into sound. This project in acoustic ecology will help foster environmental stewardship to become part of children’s sense of themselves. Moreover, this project should increase the children’s agency to communicate about environmental issues.
Last updated September 2025.
