I am looking at a moment in December. In the model this is a moment in the year when the ice concentration is recovering from approximately three months of zero cover. Ice concentration on December 17th is showing itself to be just over 51%. However, now that I have built tools into the GUI to make the information offer visual as well as audio cues  I can see that the thickness of the ice is still negligible. A diaphanous, vulnerable reading of 0.35. Evaporation levels seem - to my untrained eye - high, as does the surface temperature of the water, -13 degrees celsius which is just under half the range for the year. One would have thought that the Arctic sea in December would be somewhat lower.

I continue to build features onto the engine using the existing samples and sine waves, but there is a whole new dimension being presented now that I have linked the scaling of the data to the amplitude of each channel. Here, when there is no surface ice, or there is ice, but of negligible thickness, or precipitation and evaporation levels drop then so too do the amplitude for those channels. This means that rather than have tonality and dis/harmony present the changes, there is much to be said by features and sounds dropping out of the composition altogether. At certain points in the year there may be near silence.

This dimension of sound levels rising and falling may acquire a further dimension if Finlo’s colleague, to whom he introduced me this morning, can send through some biomass details regarding the spring bloom that I can map to the granular MC objects.