The Carrington Event
In 1859, the Sun belched out a huge ball of plasma. This plasma hit Earth, causing the strongest solar storm in recorded history - known as the Carrington Event after one of the many astronomers that monitored its progress in magnetic observatories around the world. As auroras danced across the skies as far south as the Caribbean, these scientists dutifully logged its peaks onto graph paper.
In 2012, a Carrington-sized storm narrowly missed the Earth, and by this point scientists had learnt enough about solar storms that they were very, very, very glad it did. To try to learn more, physicist Karen Aplin and meteorologist Giles Harrison painstakingly digitised the yellowing records of the Carrington Event from Flagstaff Observatory in Melbourne and published their findings in 2014, offering the data up to anyone who wants it.
In 2024, musicians Duncan Geere and Ben Dexter Cooley decided they wanted to experiment with live performances that use a process called "sonification" to turn data into sound. Both had experimented with sonification in the past, but wanted to find new, more expressive ways of rendering data through music. They decided to team up, collaborating on the creation of a data-driven score from the data published by Aplin and Harrison, but then interpreting that score in their own musical styles.