One night in 2013, artist Stephan Crawford was sitting in his studio in San Francisco, thinking of a way of expressing Earth’s carbon cycle through a moving sculpture. He had a metal rod in his hand, and he started tapping it against his workbench. And that’s when the eureka moment struck. “That tapping made me think of a rhythm,” Crawford says. “And then it went straight to the idea of music.”
Four years later, Crawford runs The ClimateMusic Project, a group of scientists, musicians, and composers who create music based on climate data — and then throw concerts to communicate the urgency of climate change to the public. The current piece they’re performing, by composer Erik Ian Walker, runs about 30 minutes long, and spans 500 years...
