Ever since the Covid-19 crisis has begun, it is as though life has stopped on earth.
However, satellites never stopped working, continuously collecting sampled data as they have always done.
Thanks to this never-stopped job we are now able to compare the data collected before covid with the one recorded during the decline of human activity. Our way of living has so drastically changed in such a short period of time that it has created a lot of variations in the data, especially those linked to the environment.
This drop in activity has a very positive impact on the environment and it is crucial for the future of mankind that everybody gets that. It is important to remember that global warming and air pollution is not a fate, Nasa’s ozone layers datas prove it.
Since the quarantine restrictions are different in each country, and even at smaller scale, the variations of environmental data are locally dependant.
We choose in our example to display ozone layer positive disruption, which changes at a country scale. For other environmental data, such as number of fisch in a specific region, the scale will be of course reduced.
Our aim is to keep the ozone data as low as they are over time. To do that we deeply count on people citizenship, and concern. They need to see that those positive data are directly linked to their non-over-consumption and non-commuting. It should encourage them to continue in this dynamic.
However, the data are very long lists of indigest numbers. How can we convince people to continue to lower their consumption, to travel less, etc.. if they cannot see the positive impact of their efforts?How can we make the data accessible to all of us?
We decided to convert the datas into musical tone, so that the variation would be displayed as melody. By doing that we hope to trigger the sensibility of us all, without the feeling of being blamed. It is a recreational way, a new approach that even children can understand, to address the global warming issue.
What inspired your team to choose this challenge?
It all started with a sentence "People believe the earth stopped spinning with the Covid-19" and the image of the rotating earth inspired us.
A nice metaphor to illustrate our idea is a music box. As a music box rotates to play music, the earth rotates, the satellites collect sampled datas, the notes, and our app display them.
We live in the big data world, and people get a sizable amount of graph number so it loses impact. With the idea that the earth is a big music box, we change the way of seeing those large amount of data, which could make them have more impact. Man is not used to seeing this type of representation. He acquires information by a new sense which can bring him a new sentient and It match perfectly with this challenge.
What was your approach to developing this project?
The current most used solution to display datas is by plotting them. One can use line chart, bar chart, pie chart, 3D plotting, animated plotting etc..
The choice is very large, but it remains visual and that’s our point. What we offer today is a hearing approach. The idea is to transform data into musical tones.
Communication is all about animating at least one of the 5 sens: vision, hearing, touch, smell, taste. But the most efficient way is to stimulate several at the same time.
What we offer today, to those who wants to pass a message, through displayed datas, is to stimulate not 1 but 3 sens at the time. It will touch a larger public, and give the interlocutor a more sensible approach:One that is not necessary responsive to numbers can be responsive to music, or to vibration.
One that is responsive to numbers might be even more, when receiving in addition hearing and sensorial stimulations.Let’s take the example of a horror movie. An ugly monster is standing in front of the main character with a knife. What will frighten you and stress you isn’t only how bad looking is the monster, it is the creepy sounds you hear in the background, the floor and the doors squeaking, your sofa vibrating.
If the movie industry use it, why don’t we ?
How did you use space agency data in your project?
We collect the data via Giavonni the API. The goal is to collect data up to date, daily and with depth. The data is used to generate the notes. Firstly, the data is cleaned up to remove the outliers. Then we aggregate the values according to the resolution per day in order to reduce the number of notes and have a short melody. In fact, if the melody is too long, the immediate access to the data is lost. Then we collect the extrema over a rolling year from the end data in order to remove the effects of seasonality but we do not go too far in the past to have coherent extrema. In order to create the notes, we just calculate the relative proportion of each point which is then bucketized on 12 levels corresponding to the notes of classical piano. The piano notes have the same duration but we just balance the tempo by accelerating the accute notes according to its pitch. In this example, the faster and sharper the notes, the thicker the larger the ozone layer.
What tools, coding languages, hardware, software did you use to develop your project?
For this project we used mostly python and kivy for the application structure. This project had to combine data collection, data processing and visualization. We also encounter problems of signal processing and musicality
What problems and achievements did your team have?
Problem:
The main problem was the search for data because the covid is recent so only the current and daily data could be used. In addition, we cannot stand back which made it hard to embark on one of the hazardous prediction.
Not being very familiar with spatial data, their understanding also hampers the project. But ultimately, we made progress in the world of spatial data and their understanding.
Achievements:
We succeed in creating an application. On the first screen, we choose:
- a country
-a measurement
-a period
-a time resolution
By clicking on ok, we generate a wav file. This can be viewed because the file is materialized. But the click sends us to a popup. On this popup you can update the song and that is accompanied by a visual follow-up by color intensity according to the note played.
For visualization, the higher the intensity, the thicker the ozone layer and therefore better. For the soundtrack, the higher and faster the note, the thicker the ozone layer and vice versa. There are two examples of sound for France (France_Ozone_20190902_20200523_reso_7j.wav) and China (China_Ozone_20190902_20200523_reso_7j.wav) in the github. It allows to see and hear that China activities has resumed because the ozone layer has decreased but this is not yet the case for France.
-Music Data https://freesound.org/
-Spatial Data Area-Averaged of Ozone Total Column (TOMS-like) daily 1 deg. [OMI OMTO3d v003] https://giovanni.gsfc.nasa.gov/giovanni/