Climate change has become the biggest threat to life on earth. A threat so overwhelming that people prefer to ignore it. The NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra wanted to use the power of music to make people listen up.

So, we made climate change audible.

We took the most famous musical depiction of nature, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and adapted it to today’s weather conditions, using historical climate data. A collaborative team of sound artists, software developers and music arrangers converted the original work into a new score: For Seasons. Custom-built algorithms were fed with 300 years of data to recompose the masterpiece.

After months of work and rehearsals, the For Seasons premiered at Elbphilharmonie Hamburg to a sold-out crowd and to 150,000 live viewers on Facebook. Led by world-renowned conductor Alan Gilbert, the philharmonic orchestra performed the altered concertos to a visibly shocked audience. The concert ended with a 7-minute standing ovation.

Vivaldi wrote the Four Seasons in 1723. His work was a revolution in musical composition: In each of the four concertos, he portrayed the characteristics of the seasons and their natural phenomena like flowing creeks, violent storms, frozen landscapes and even singing birds.

But, since then, the world he depicted in his music has dramatically changed.

To imagine what Vivaldi would compose today, we analysed every single nature element in the Four Seasons. Then, from temperature anomalies to CO2 emissions and to species extinctions, we gathered more than 10 data sets from the early 18th century until the present day to recompose the four concerti.

Custom-built algorithms were fed with 300 years of data to transform what Vivaldi had expressed in his masterpiece into what we experience today.

The algorithms mapped the data on the sheet music in two leves: Cross-concert and motif-specific. While overall climate data sets were used to enhance all four seasons, special data sets like “insect population” were mapped only on individual motifs like “buzzing flies”.

For instance, the algorithms adjusted the duration of the seasons: today’s Winter is 51 bars shorter. Motifs of Summer already arrive in Spring.

Vivaldi represented “Summer’s occasional thunderstorms” with flashing violin solos. The algorithms placed unexpected thunderstorm motifs throughout the entire piece according to the dramatic increase in natural catastrophes.

The violin trills, mimicking bird sounds were reduced by 15%, signifying the decline in bird populations.

The new piece is not pleasant at all: harmonic passages shift into disharmonies, seasons blend together and some notes are completely missing, resulting in an increasingly disturbing experience to the audience's ears. The balance is lost, just like in nature itself.