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.
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.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Welcome to TARTLE Cast. With your host Alexander McCaig and Jason Rigby. Where humanity steps into the future, and source data defines the path.
Alexander McCaig (00:27):
Hey everybody. You know, some people like to chase seasons, snowbirds. I was trying to stay warm and stuff like that, but it's nice having the variability of four seasons, I'd be pretty bummed out if the earth started to lack those four seasons, in terms of like climate stability. And so there was this really good piece of research that was done with this group. AQKR what is it?
Jason Rigby (00:55):
Yeah, AQK, QA, AKQA,
Alexander McCaig (00:58):
AKQA.
Jason Rigby (00:59):
That's a tough one.
Alexander McCaig (01:00):
Well they took a bunch of data scientists, and they came together with data scientists and symphonies and composers. And they took that data to say, "what would, Vivaldi's Four Seasons sound like in a future climate world? If we look at where we're currently headed."
Jason Rigby (01:21):
Without four seasons.
Alexander McCaig (01:22):
without four seasons. So let's listen just for a brief moment to what Vivaldi's Four Seasons sounds like by itself. This is spring.
Alexander McCaig (01:51):
Okay. So I think all of us, I would assume just about everybody on the planet has heard that song.
Jason Rigby (01:58):
Right.
Alexander McCaig (01:58):
Now. There's interesting parts of the climate model, which are quite staggering here that, in 2050, they think Shanghai is going to be under water. It'll cease to exist. And the representation of that data's value, when put to a compositional note, is no sound at all. So all that bright jovial, springtime growth, happiness that you hear, nothing. You'll actually hear in Vivaldi's four seasons, periods of complete and utter silence, for areas of the globe in the climate model that will never exist in the places where you would hear.
Alexander McCaig (02:33):
In the summer version, plants and animals are moving about. And it has very symphonic, it has good pattern to it. It becomes chaotic. It's erratic. The music is all over the place, the tones don't match with one another properly. And it's really amazing to hear that, music which connects with us at such an emotional level, that when we take a climate model and put it into music, that's the emotional state. You can almost picture receiving, if you were living in 2050, if we made no positive changes right now.
Jason Rigby (03:11):
Right.
Alexander McCaig (03:11):
For helping our climate. What are you thoughts about that?
Jason Rigby (03:15):
I want to get into this because I want people to understand... And this is what all art does, music. It's a representation, and it brings awareness to an issue that we may be facing as humanity. Good artists do that, they may paint something that may be wild looking to us.
Alexander McCaig (03:33):
Or take a picture.
Jason Rigby (03:34):
Or offensive. I've seen art that can look offensive, but then it's bringing awareness to a cause.
Alexander McCaig (03:39):
Sure.
Jason Rigby (03:41):
I saw a really cool one. This guy had a turtle that he had sculpted, and then it had a big straw in its' nose. And that's like, Ooh. And the turtle was looking like it was in pain, but that caused... we're using paper straws and stuff like that.
Alexander McCaig (03:56):
What was the turtle's name? Strawberry. That's effed up.
Jason Rigby (03:56):
Oh, dude.
Alexander McCaig (03:56):
Sorry.
Jason Rigby (03:56):
Okay, Let's get back to the one season of Vivaldi's-
Alexander McCaig (03:57):
Shouldn't have done that. Yeah-
Jason Rigby (03:57):
Strawberry.
Alexander McCaig (04:07):
Vivaldi's Four Seasons.
Jason Rigby (04:09):
Strawberry wine. Is like a country song. That's all I could think of. I do like strawberries.
Alexander McCaig (04:14):
Strawberries are great.
Jason Rigby (04:16):
Yeah. They're yummy. So instead of hearing strings play, which sounds like a thunderstorm once, you might hear it repeatedly, illustrating the extreme rainfall that some cities will experience. Much of the score though, it meant to evoke the feeling of each season. Vivaldi's spring was intended to be joyful. And then like you had talked about in summer, it creates this... Because of wildfires, hurricanes, food insecurities, all these disasters, then these disasters become common. They just become common place.
Alexander McCaig (04:45):
You hear the same tones over and over and over. There's no variability, symphonic variability, in nice pattern, chord progression, whatever it might be, that you enjoy in listening to music.
Jason Rigby (04:59):
Yeah. And I know they did a performance in Sydney. The team plans to work with orchestras in each city to perform other local versions. This is how we thought we could connect with local areas, he says. So there's [crosstalk 00:05:12]. They're even talking about, if they went to Shanghai and they had that real quiet moment, the Shanghai symphony had that real quiet moment.
Alexander McCaig (05:18):
You mean it's a completely silent orchestra the whole time.
Jason Rigby (05:22):
Completely silent orchestra, maybe for a period of time, everything was going good, and then everybody kind of knows this point is going to happen.
Alexander McCaig (05:27):
Tone starts to drop off.
Jason Rigby (05:28):
Yeah, And then it's going to bring, displacement. Millions of people having to be refugees. It brings us huge awareness, especially when you begin to connect with people in their own circumstances.
Alexander McCaig (05:42):
I know I listen.
Jason Rigby (05:44):
And I want to talk about this, connecting with people in their own circumstances. You have, in our TARTLE statement is "change your world."
Alexander McCaig (05:53):
Yeah.
Jason Rigby (05:54):
So connecting people in their own experiences and circumstances.
Alexander McCaig (05:58):
You have to meet them where they are. So much like the symphony, is meeting people locally in their own environment. Everybody has their own inputs and experiences, depending on where they are in the world.
Jason Rigby (06:07):
That's what makes them so unique.
Alexander McCaig (06:08):
Yeah. So that's the uniqueness. And we need to cherish that uniqueness, not put people into buckets. And say, "you work this way. You work this way." No. We have to meet them where they are. Every everyone has their own path that they're taking. So how do we come together to help people on their path, help people in their path, help people in theirs so that- I'm going to get this bug. So that when we look at elevating the world, we're not elevating it and just like a bulk of everybody doing the same thing. Because we've seen that that doesn't work. You have to elevate people at their point in time, where they want to be elevated. They need to be responsible for it, but you need to meet them at that point.
Alexander McCaig (06:44):
Otherwise, no one will understand. You're coming as such a foreign aspect, frankly. No matter how westernized an area might be, and if you're coming in from the USA and things need to be this way. Adoption needs to take hold, but people will do with their own culture and flavor. And that's what we need to look at. So solving these problems, meeting people like the symphony does, to talk about their climate in that local area, that can all be done also with your data. How do you meet people and understand them in their specific locales when you're buying that data off of them and then analyzing, and then coming back to them and be like, "Hey, look at this, look at what's going on for you guys here, specifically to you." That becomes something that has a much deeper connection. And a lot of that connection is made right here with data alone, whether in the stance of music or outright just showing someone, maybe some sort of visual from analyzing the data.
Jason Rigby (07:32):
Yeah, and I want to encourage everybody to go to TARTLE.co, T A R T L E dot C O. If you are concerned about climate stability, as we are, we have that number one on our big seven. Then we'd encourage you to sign up. You can go to TARTLE.co and you can literally donate your data. Things that you're creating already. It's not costing you anything,
Alexander McCaig (07:53):
yep.
Jason Rigby (07:54):
but it's taking and changing your world because that data that you donate, TARTLE turns around and facilitates this exchange to that not-for-profit.
Alexander McCaig (08:07):
Yeah. So if you're selling your data and you're creating all these earnings from it, you're like, "I really do care about sea turtles and straws in their nose. Maybe I want to put some of my earnings towards that."
Jason Rigby (08:19):
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Alexander McCaig (08:20):
Right? So by sharing your data in total, you can take all those earnings, keep some for you or share, or keep it all, or donate it all. You have all that flexibility and choice, and you can meet those not-for-profits or those people that are really out there, boots on the ground, handling this stuff, trying to get it done. You can help support them in doing so.
Jason Rigby (08:39):
And, one last question, Alex, and we'll be done. If somebody wants to... I already mentioned how you sign up, but let's say there's a company out there and they want to help climate stability. And not only do they want to help climate stability, but maybe they're looking at first party data, and then wanting to purchase that. How would they do that?
Alexander McCaig (09:00):
Yeah. So if you're out there, and you have that focus as a research group, and you want first party data, you would sign up on TARTLE as a data buyer, and then you would say, "okay, what's the locale I want to get it from? What specific demographic of people do I need it?" and "How often do I want to acquire this data?" essentially? And so you choose those things and then you say, "This is the data packet I want." And you institute that bid out to the marketplace, and then you're going to receive it ethically sourced in return, from all those people. First party data.
Alexander McCaig (09:31):
You'll know their consumption habits, behaviors, everything that is essentially affecting the model in that locale that you're focusing on. You couldn't ask for anything better. It's much easier than going and paneling people door-to-door-to-door, or asking them. It's straight there. It's like, here is a consent based approach, I will pay you for information that we need, and then you're going to share it if you choose to do so. No harm, no foul, simple transaction, ethically sourced, and it gives people the most granular data they could ever ask for.
Jason Rigby (10:03):
Yeah. It's climate stability. Four seasons.
Alexander McCaig (10:06):
Yeah.
Jason Rigby (10:06):
TARTLE.co
Speaker 1 (10:15):
Thank you for listening to TARTLE Cast with your hosts, Alexandra McCain and Jason Rigby. Where humanity steps into the future, and source data defines the path. What's your data worth?
