In August 2015 Greenpeace turned their Arctic drilling protests into one of music. Inspired by the string quartet that famously played as the Titanic went down, a classical piece was written and performed outside Shell’s London offices each day for as long as they continued to drill for oil. The piece of music was called Requiem for Arctic Ice and musicians and celebrity supporters took their turn to perform the musical protest at Shell’s HQ over time.

We extended this physical musical protest to the online space by working with composers to record a series of complementary instruments. These sounds were then triggered by digital actions from supporters, including tweets and messages of protest to Shell’s social accounts, petition signatures, site visits or shares.

The result was a real-time and dynamically created musical composition generated by the social support and digital actions of supporters from around the world.

The website, viewable on any browser or device, went live on the 3rd of August 2015 and used new web audio APIs to seamlessly translate social and digital actions into real time music. The website was promoted through Greenpeace’s social channels on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, as well as their eCRM and supporter databases.

The Requiem website also housed a timeline of content featuring updates from London, the celebrity supporters, the milestones of support and petition signatures.

The Requiem was featured in numerous online publications including The Guardian and The Huffington Post.

It had an average dwell time of 6 minutes and the hundreds of thousands of digital actions, messages of protest, petition signatures and website visits kept the Requiem playing for 8 weeks until Shell announced they were pulling out of the Arctic.

The campaign was featured in numerous online publications including The Guardian and The Huffington Post.

Acts of social support from the website that triggered the music generated over 100M impressions on twitter. Shell saw over 30,000 messages of protest posted to their Facebook pages. And the website itself had an average dwell time of 6 minutes as visitors were drawn into the sounds being created and the feeling of being part of this global musical protest.

As the Requiem came to a crescendo eight weeks after it began, and nearly four years since Greenpeace started their Save The Arctic campaign, Shell finally announced they were canceling their drilling plans and withdrawing from the Arctic.