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I’ve finished a piece of programmatic music that I started in 2022.
It’s the The Sound of Ocean Heat Energy!
You can listen to (and watch) it here:
https://jimkang.com/ocean-heat-energy/
You can also grab it (along with an alternate version) at Bandcamp:
https://jimkang.bandcamp.com/album/the-sound-of-ocean-heat-energy
It’s ambient music. If you’re unfamiliar with the genre, it is totally expected that you’ll put it on in the background while you do other stuff. It will work in both foreground and background attention spaces.
Ocean heat content to chords
The piece is a data sonification. It presents the world’s ocean heat content from 1970 to 2025 by transforming it into sound. The sound is denser when the ocean heat content is higher, and it’s sparser when it’s lower.
The change in heat energy absorbed by the world’s oceans is large yet gradual. The values are measured in zettajoules (10^21 joules). By 2025, the ocean had absorbed ~300 more ZJ of energy than it had in 1970.
This is massive and dramatic, but via numbers alone, it’s still going to seem abstract to many people.
While I’m not sure that weird ambient music is the solution to this problem for everyone, I’m willing to bet it is for a few people out there. The idea is to help people feel the change through sound. The more I listened to it, the more I got a sense of the journey, and in particular, how accelerative the 21st century has been.
The tonality diamond
The pitches in the chords are chosen using Harry Partch’s tonality diamond, a way of extending the just intonation system so that you can have far more than 12 pitches inside of an octave. If you click on the Info button on the web app, there’s some explanation of how the tonality diamond works. If you have questions about the tonality diamond or just want a more extended explanation, let me know.
How this came about
I realize I may have now given the impression that I first thought, how can I get people to understand how heat is affecting the oceans? Actually, no. I started with the question, “How can I get people to sit with really dense chords?” There’s more about that in the Bandcamp liner notes.
Technical notes
This piece was mostly developed in Firefox, and there, it sounds the way I intended. There’s clipping in places, but that’s clipping that I want. On Chrome and Chromium-based browsers like Vivaldi, it silences some of it, which isn’t want I want, but is OK; most of the piece sounds fine.
I’ve been told that in the Brave browser, some feature named Shields blocks audio, and you have to turn it off for my site. And on Ubuntu, I had to change the time buffer size to avoid getting weird audio artifacts.
So, if you don’t have Firefox and want to hear it the way it was intended to sound, the Bandcamp version is the way to go. It doesn’t have the visualization, but it is less CPU-intensive and can be easily listened to on-the-go.
Here’s the source. Have fun with it, but please don’t feed it to an LLM.
Advanced listening techniques
Because I had to listen to the piece so many times to debug it, I eventually stumbled on listening to it at the same time I was listening to a podcast or some other music. In this context, Ocean Heat Energy because a kind of undermusic that would creep up and shape the other music. I highly recommend it!
I bet this isn’t the only music that can work like this. I’m going to try this with Alien Planetscapes.
Pricing
I’ve observed that people are more likely to engage with and value music if they pay for it, so I normally set a price. I believe in getting people to pay for music.
But sometimes it’s not the right time to be spending money on music for some people, so I usually send out free download codes as well. However, I ran out of Bandcamp download codes, so I’ve just set the price to pay what you want.
Jim