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Nick Zinner (of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs) is a musician who ceaselessly surprises us with his versatility. He blew us away when he led an orchestral ensemble of 41 strings in an originally composed performance celebrating the 41st anniversary of Earth Day. Organic clothing company Loomstate put on the event, where Zinner conducted and played with an impressive lineup of violins, violas, cellos, electric and acoustic guitars, upright bass, electric bass (and some drums and synths thrown in for good measure). “Writing this piece has been different than anything I’ve ever done,” Zinner says in the behind-the scenes-video (above), “I just want to make something that’s good and has some sort of emotional resonance, something that’s easy to connect with.” (source).

 

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Cateura, Paraguay, is a town essentially built on top of a landfill. A few years ago, one of the garbage pickers, Cola, an untutored genius of the slum, got together with local musician Favio Chavez to make instruments for the children of the slum. There was no money for real instruments so together they started to make instruments from trash – violins and cellos from oil drums, flutes from water pipes and spoons, guitars from packing crates. Children like the luminous Ada and her friend Tania, pick them up. With their help and the support of many in the slum, Favio slowly puts together one of the world’s most unlikely orchestras.Landfill Harmonic shows how trash and recycled materials can be transformed into beautiful sounding musical instruments, but more importantly, it brings witness to the transformation of precious human beings. (source).

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“A Song of Our Warming Planet,” came about following a conversation Crawford had with geography professor Scott St. George during an internship. St. George asked Crawford about the possibility of turning a set of data into music. Crawford used an approach called data sonification to convert global temperature records into a series of musical notes. The result is a haunting sequence that traces the warming of our planet year by year since the late 19th century. During a run of cold years between the late 1800s and early 20th century, the cello is pushed towards the lower limit of its range. The piece moves into the mid-register to track the modest warming that occurred during the 1940s. As the sequence approaches the present, the cello reaches higher and higher notes, reflecting the string of warm years in the 1990s and 2000s. (source).