Michael Sheriff, a professor of mammalogy and ecology at Penn State University, has been compiling data on to climate cycles through the hibernation patterns of arctic squirrels.
"I am really interested in how the changes in the internal workings of an animal affect how they deal with their surroundings and how their surroundings affect the internal workings of the animal," Sheriff told The Daily Collegian, Penn State's student newspaper. "So, I am interested in how ecological stressors trigger changes in the animal and how they are able to respond to these stressors."
Arctic squirrels were chosen as the subjects of the study. "Because I work on the internal working of an animal, I have to be able to handle an animal and it is much easier to use smaller prey animals, or smaller animals in general than, say, a caribou," Sheriff told The Daily Collegian. "A ground squirrel has a much smaller home range than a caribou."
"By studying squirrels in Alaska, I'm trying to better understand how animals respond to changes in snow cover. When they end hibernation and breed, for example," Sheriff said, according to a Penn State news release. "Climate change affects and alters when snow falls in winter and melts in spring, so I'd like to learn more about animals' ability to respond and alter the timing of these life events."
Mark Ballora, a professor of music technology, reached out to Sheriff about creating an auditory version of his research. "I hadn't ever heard of sonification until Mark and I did this," Sheriff told The Daily Collegian. "So, I really wasn't sure what it was. So, when he presented to put sound on these body temperature changes, I thought this is an ideal way to capture audiences outside of science."
Sonification is the process of taking research data sets and transcribing the information into audio files. "It sounds pretty scratchy and screechy at first, so that's what's compelling, actually the design issue. How do you make it sound interesting," Ballora told The Daily Collegian. "It is easy to make it sound like something, but if you want to get really good at it, you want to work at it."
Ballora used an audio synthesis program called SuperCollider. The data was translated by relating differences in pitch to degrees of body temperature. "The thing that we hear most easily is pitch, you know you said you make a melody out of it. Well, that's often how you will start," Ballora told The Daily Collegian. "You take the numbers from the data set and translate them to frequencies in pitches, 'cause anybody can hear a pitch."
"A nice-sounding sonification can engage the public - perhaps younger students, for example - in ways a visual graph can't," Sheriff said, according to the news release. "It engages different senses and makes it a unique experience."
Based on the squirrels' activities, music was made - a low pitch for hibernation and a high pitch denoted periods of high activity.
Matthew Kenney, a graduate student at Penn State, helped out with Ballora's sonification program. Kenney said, according to the new release, "Sonifying the data allowed us to really dig into the history of this region and tell its story from thousands of years ago to the present."
