The Sound of the Weather – Campbell Station Drives Musical Art Installation  

Campbell Scientific (UK) have supplied weather stations for a wide variety of diverse applications over the years but, until now, art installations was never one of them. Marketing Manager, Iain Thornton said “The invitation to sponsor such an unusual project was irresistible; typically weather data is processed and visualised in tables or graphs not used as the basis for musical composition”

The project, named Variable4, is the brainchild of sound artist & composer, James Bully and colleague artist, composer and software engineer, Daniel Jones. The event is funded by the PRS for Music Foundation and sponsored by Campbell Scientific and is scheduled to take place on May 22nd this year, on Dungeness headland in Kent, UK.

Here is how Daniel Jones describes the event: “Variable 4 will transform weather patterns into a living musical composition with the same instability and unpredictability as the elements themselves. Using meteorological sensors connected to a custom software environment we have developed, the wild weather conditions of the Kent coast-land will be used to generate new combinations of musical forms, heard through a field of speakers embedded invisibly into the landscape.”

A Campbell Scientific BWS200 weather station is being supplied which will be recording wind speed and direction, precipitation, air temperature, relative humidity and solar radiation. The integrated CR200 data logger will process the data and talk to the Variable4 computer system via a MD485 multi-drop interface. Sensors will be sampled in near real time so that even subtle changes will affect the music.

“We have all heard the wind before but not like this, and certainly not in chorus with temperature, sunshine and rainfall – it will be an interesting event and I would urge anyone with an interest in the weather to come and experience it ” Commented Iain Thornton.