This is a Must Go Listen too 😉
An example of a rare and special art form called data-driven music or sonification. Imagine an orchestra of instruments. In this orchestra, the musicians playing the instruments are not human. Rather the instruments are played by data – data that has been collected from nature. In this particular case, the music is created by numbers representing fluctuations in wolf abundance, moose abundance, and climate on Isle Royale National Park over the past five decades (1959-2014). The documentation of those fluctuations represents the longest continuous study of any predator-prey system in the world. Click here for details on that ecological research.
More specifically, you are experiencing fluctuations in wolf abundance over the years as musical notes that seem to be rising from a dulcimer-like instrument. And, you hear fluctuations in moose abundance as notes flowing from a pulsing rhythmic synthesizer. Variation in weather from year to year – temperature and precipitation – are registered as varying velocities of rain and other musical notes. The music contains other creative features. For example, wolf abundance is also accented by actual wolf sound effects. Also, listen for changes in the amount of reverberation in the wolf track. That reverberation follows temporal trends in the level of inbreeding that the wolf population has suffered over the years. Other ecological phenomena, such as predation rate and calf production, are also represented by various harmonic and textural elements.