Making Melodic Music from Galway’s Weather

An ingenious new method has been discovered to convert weather data into music. This process links the science of data to the art of music in a novel way that bridges the gap between tech and tradition!

The project proves the concept that melodic music can be generated from seemingly random data. This week, Galway Science and Technology Festival will release examples of this sonification project on their YouTube channel, to coincide with the annual Festival.

The music was created from data obtained during Storm Jorge which passed through Moycullen in February. Brian Wall operates Moycullen Weather, a personal weather station that has been in operation in Moycullen village since 2010. Brian, creator of the Weather Data Sonification Project, and the team running the project gathered data on wind speed, temperature, humidity, barometric pressure and UV index. They took this data and experimented with traditional music to see if they could enhance the quality of resulting musical sounds. Find more information on how they did this here.

Storm Jorge produced some interesting weather data which Brian Wall, Mathieu d’Aquin and musician Danny Diamond converted to beautiful melodic music. Danny Diamond is an Irish performer, musician and composer who performed the outcome of this musical adventure. You can check out some more of his music here...

In future work the researchers at NUI Galway are planning to carry out further enhancements to the traditional music database and to the algorithms developed in this initial work. Sonification has many practical uses including warning sounds and alarms. This is a start of an exciting new study as data is rarely if ever used to create a new piece of art or music.

This Sunday 22 November, this year's virtual Galway Science and Technology Festival takes place. Find out how you can get involved here.