Biodiversity in Decline: Living Planet Index Sonification by TARA

This piece is a sonified interpretation of the 2024 Living Planet Index (LPI) for North America. Data sonification is the process of translating data into sound, allowing people to more readily and holistically access complex datasets. As sound has a unique ability to evoke emotion, data sonification can tap into this emotional resonance, helping to engage audiences on a deeper level and foster empathy towards the subject matter. The goal of this piece is to help demonstrate the gravity of the data showing the significant decline in biodiversity that our world has experienced over the past 50 years due to human impact through musical interpretation.

The LPI has been developed by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Zoological Society of London (ZSL) to measure the state of the world's biological diversity based on population trends of vertebrate species from terrestrial, freshwater and marine habitats.

Using the E minor scale, each note of the piece represents a data point from
the LPI spanning the years 1970-2020 as represented in this graph. The difference from 1970-2020 was calculated then divided by the number of desired note, with each year's data point assigned a note based on its value.

More information and the WWF/ZSL full report is available online at www.livingplanetindex.org.

Flying bird clips 1, 2, 4, and 6 are from the Open Planet collection. Open Planet is a freely available collection of videos to support education and advocacy around environmental protection.
Clip 1, 2 & 4 Credit - Silverback Films.
Clip 6 Credit - Aishwarya Sridhar.

Visit Open Planet at www.openplanet.org.