I had an excellent meeting with Lukrecia this afternoon. She has the data, and so was able to share with me what it is she sees when the data arrives. Arrays of figures representing 6 hourly readings from grids covering the whole surface of the planet. A bewildering amount of information, especially as the readings are mapped across 100 separate elements.

She will take the six hourly readings from key foundation aspects; sea ice, air temperature, precipitation, salinity, surface temperature, and more, and average them out to a single daily reading. This will give us the core.

I showed her how the Max environment consumes the data, and made sure to alert her to how so many parameters of a sound; its amplitude, its timbre, its duration, its resonant frequency range can all be dynamically affected by scaled data fed into the system.

As hoped, this generated a degree of excitement in her, and through the screen I could see her mind start to spin as she sensed a new dimension in her understanding of her data collection. This is so much what I had hoped to see. She could not immediately articulate her thoughts. It’s all a bit new, but as it will just take me a few short hours to load in the first data set, and she has indicated that her schedule eases up somewhat over the next week or so, I forecast some really interesting discussions about how, musically, to represent the impact of one data stream on another.

One thing that she has alerted me to is that whereas the Antarctic data is crowded and swoops with dramatic changes of values in the data points, the Arctic material will be much more subtle. This initially gave me pause for concern as my first reaction was to assume that there would be no drama, no immediately perceptible sense of increasing damage, chaos, entropy. But on further reflection, I must keep true to the data in some sense, and if the message is subtle, then I have to work with that. Those are the terms laid out by the readings.