What Does Climate Change Sound Like As Music?

Climate change research can be daunting and depressing. To properly engage with it takes time, and short catchphrases, like “the Earth is warming” don’t tell the full story of what’s going on. How can climate researchers convey the urgency and importance of their message? Some of them have turned to music. In a new, ten-minute Polish documentary produced for ClientEarth, composers Szymon Weiss and Szymon Sutor describe how they reinterpreted Vivaldi’s Four Seasons to convey the effects of climate change. Their piece, “The Lost Seasons”, uses musical composition to represent how the musicians perceive climate change to affect “a change of seasons from four to five, or maybe to three, maybe to a chaos of seasons.” The work was first presented at the 2018 United Nations Climate Change Conference COP24 in Katowice, Poland, last December.