Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is one of the greatest and most well-known pieces of classical music around. Nearly everyone (and I mean everyone) has heard at least some part of it whether they know it or not. The great composer wonderfully captures the feel of each season through sound. Spring is light and joyful, while winter is starker, more foreboding. It’s simply a masterpiece that orchestras around the world play on a regular basis. Now, several orchestras have taken on the task of interpreting Vivaldi’s great work in what can best be described as a novel approach. 

The approach was developed with the help of AKQA, a communications and design group working in conjunction with data scientists to reflect predicted changes to the climate in the next fifty or so years. However, rather than making one composition that would be played everywhere, they used the algorithms they specially developed for the purpose to create hundreds of new versions, each designed to evoke the climate changes in various locations around the globe. The one for Shanghai is actually completely silent. That’s because the computer models they were using show that city being underwater by then. No, I’m not sure how many tickets they plan on selling. Some sort of original introit describing the fall of the city might be more interesting, but they didn’t ask me. 

I digress. The point of the exercise is to alert people to the kinds of changes that might be coming their way, even within their own lifetimes. The team that developed these new renditions of The Four Seasons will be working with orchestras around the world to perform their work, with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra having signed to perform the first public rendition. Where it goes from there is less important than any effect it might have on those who listen to it. Will it actually encourage the listeners to care about and take some sort of action on the environment? And if so, how?

Very often, the way people take action on the environment is to vote for a politician or maybe take up a particular cause. Well, no policy is going to fix everything, no amount of money thrown at the problem is going to just make it go away. What will change things is changing your own behaviors.

Want fewer carbon emissions? Keep your house a couple degrees cooler in the winter and ride your bike to the corner gas station ten minutes away instead of driving twenty to get to the grocery store for that gallon of milk. Or install geothermal heating. Worried about straws? Instead of switching to a paper one, don’t use one at all. After all, someone had to cut down a tree for the paper straw. 

Speaking of straws, if you are a restaurant, at least try to be consistent. Right when the straws were a big deal in the news I went to a restaurant that had signs proclaiming their commitment to not using plastic straws. And then they brought my drink in a plastic cup and when I got my food, I ate it with plastic cutlery. You can’t make this stuff up. 

What else? Encourage people to take care of the things that are right in front of them. It’s a lot easier to point out the landfill down the road, or the river you want to keep clean and get people to care about keeping that in good condition than it is to get them to take drastic action based on a computer model. It’s too abstract for most. 

In a way, that’s what the people behind this new interpretation of Vivaldi are trying to do, to make the abstract tangible. However, if you really want to change things, start with your own behaviors and help others to make better decisions on their own. With enough people changing their behaviors in that way, it will have a much bigger effect on global climate, while improving things in your local area, too. 

Naturally, one thing you can do is to share your behaviors through TARTLE. That way, businesses and researchers can determine what kind of policies are working, or might work, what products people are buying to minimize their environmental impact and what particular issues most people care about. Your data can help with all of this and more.

What’s your data worth? Sign up and join the TARTLE Marketplace with this link here.