The pre-industrial vivace is a procedurally generated piece of music made from the UK's Earth System Model, UKESM. Scientific data is almost always represented graphically either in figures or in videos. In this work, we use time series data from the UK Earth System model (UKESM) to create a procedurally generated musical piece.
The UKESM ( is a computational simulation of the Earth System produced by several research teams around the UK. UKESM is the UK’s contribution to the next international coupled model intercomparison project (CMIP6).
The pre-industrial vivace is a fast-paced piece in C Major, showing various metrics of the health of the Global Ocean in the pre-industrial control run. The pre-industrial control run is a long term (approximately 1400 years) simulation of the Earth's climate without the impact of the industrial revolution. It is effectively the climate without humans. We use the control run as starting points for historical simulations, but also to compare the difference
between human-influenced and human-less simulations.
The top pane of this video shows the global marine primary production in purple. The primary production is a measure of how much marine phytoplankton are growing. Similarly, the second pane shows the global marine surface chlorophyll concentration in green. You may notice that this line rises and falls alongside the primary production in most cases. The third and fourth panes show the global mean sea surface temperature and salinity in red and orange. The fifth pane shows the global total ice extent. These five fields demonstrate the natural non-anthropocentric behaviour of the ocean in our earth system model. There is no significant drift and there's no long term trend in any of these fields. We do see lots of natural variability spread over decades and centuries.
The time series data is calculated by the BGC-val model evaluation suite ( using data from UKESM. The time series data is converted into musical notes such that the lowest value in the dataset is played by the lowest note available, and the highest value of the dataset is the highest note available. The notes in between are assigned proportionally by their data value between the highest and lowest notes. These notes are then binned into a scale or a chord. The chords for this piece are a simple rotating 8 chord progression (C major, G major, A minor, F major, C major, D minor, E minor, F major). The primary production and chlorophyll data play the melody and are both set to C major throughout the piece. If the same note is played successively, then the first note's duration is extended and the repeated notes are removed. The velocity (loudness) of notes is determined using the same method as the pitch, however the dataset used to calculate loudness are different for each field.
When creating pieces of music like this, the arranger was allowed artistic freedom in the choice of datasets used to determine pitch and velocity, the pitch and velocity ranges for each part, the piece's tempo, the musical key and chord progression. A moving average function has also been applied to smooth out the datasets and the melodies have less smoothing that the other parts.
The piece is performed by the timidity++ midi piano:
The sheet music for this piece is available here:
About me: I'm Dr. Lee de Mora, a marine ecosystem modeller and musician based in Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML), Plymouth, Devon, England. I've helped develop and evaluate the UKESM model, the ESMValTool model evaluation suite. I also play bass and guitar in the Plymouth based band, Glass Curtain:
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