Ever wanted to listen to the hurricanes pummeling the western hemisphere? Well thanks to NY-based artist Andrea Polli’s project, “Atmospherics/Weather Works, you can tune in online or catch a mixed-weather performance of a plethora of archived storms.The project is “a performance, installation, and distributed software project for the sonification of storms (cyclones, for example) and other meteorological events generated directly from data produced by a highly detailed and physically accurate simulation of the weather.” Current storms on the site include the Presidents Day Snowstorm that happened February 18-19, 1979 and the infamous Hurricane Bob (great name!) which pummeled the Eastern seaboard of the US on Aug 18-19, 1991. Polli’s sonification of the storms maps their temperature, pressure, wind, and moisture to pitch, timbre, and amplitude of sound. You can also listen to each storm’s “sound” throughout its different elevations – just in case you weren’t stuck in a helicopter at 18,000 feet on the day. Pretty cool documentation and would have loved to check out the installation – hopefully soon. Meanwhile, there’s a nice video of Polli explaining the project.

*NOTE: Maybe we should team up UMBRELLA.net with this project to do the sonification in realtime across multiple nodes! Andrea – wanna collaborate?