Covid Nein Team| Quiet Planet

Quiet Planet

The COVID-19 outbreak and the resulting social distancing recommendations and related restrictions have led to numerous short-term changes in economic and social activity around the world, all of which may have impacts on our environment. Your challenge is to use space-based data to document the local to global environmental changes caused by COVID-19 and the associated societal responses.

The Sound Of Silence

Summary

Hear our planet react to the virus! As the world grows quiet, and people move indoors to keep their loved ones safe, we can see the effects on society, economy and environment. We turned this planetary data into music, to inspire and inform people.

How We Addressed This Challenge

We decided to take the title of the challenge quite literally - by making the data hearable though music. We decided to sort satellite data into country territories, so that we could hear the planetary data change and listen to how that corresponds to the rise and fall of COVID-19 cases and mobility data. The resulting symphonies can be heard by selecting the regions on the map.



How We Developed This Project

We've taken data from various sources, and use that to generate and modulate music. At the same time, some of us are working on gathering this data based on regions/countries, so that for each selected datatype and country, a symphony of melodies will play. We can then tie that together into a prototype web-app! 

Project Demo

The app is live at www.thesoundofsilence.biz and you can view a demo at https://youtu.be/B1tv1QL-_8k.

Data & Resources

References: 

  1. covid_19_cases.csv: Contains the number of COVID-19 cases per country as reported on the respective day. This data is provided by the European Union.
  2. mobility_data.csv: Contains the change in visits to six areas of daily life in percent versus baseline. Since six areas are added up, the minimum is -600. This data is provided by Google.
  3. co_data.csv: Contains measurements of carbon monoxide (CO) in the troposphere in exa-moles (i.e. 10^18) per cubic centimetre as reported by Measurements Of Pollution In The Troposphere (MOPITT) by the Canadian Space Agency. The data is pre-processed to an average per country per day, using the geo-location data as contained in the ../resources/countries.geojson file.
  4. no2_data.csv: Contains measurements of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) in the troposphere in exa-molecules (i.e. 10^18) per square centimetre as reported by the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI). The data is pre-processed to an average per country per eight days, using the geo-location data as contained in the ../resources/countries.geojson file.
  5. evi_data.csv: Contains measurements of the enhanced vegeatation index as reported by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership of NASA. The data is pre-processed to an average per country per day, using the geo-location data as contained in the ../resources/countries.geojson file.
  6. Video-sound effects:
    https://freesound.org/people/inchadney/   (City ยป cemetery in spring)
    https://freesound.org/people/magedu/   (cassette_deck_play_audio_cassette_01)
    https://freesound.org/people/Kyster/    (big crowd chatter)
    (cc) attribution 3.0  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
    Other sounds were generated by the App.


Tags
#social impact #audio #corona #web application #sound #data #covid19 #earth #space #art
Global Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Global Judging process.