Music and Mosaic
The Breathe project has been running for over a year now, quietly collecting data on the quality of air that we're breathing in and around our church. We've been measuring particulate matter pollution - small particles of dust or pollutants that can be responsible for lung disease.
Jonathan and Jana Sutton - Smutná have been putting together some more creative interpretations of the data that we have collected.
Making the data sing
The first thing we've done is to "sonify" the particulate matter data, by using a tool called STRAUSS which was designed to make astronomical data available to people who are visually impaired. We've taken the average PM 2.5 (particles smaller than 2.5 micrometres) measurement for every day that we have good data for (March - November 2025). Every note in the sound file is a measurement that exceeds the WHO daily guideline. The tone of the note is different for each logger: so the higher notes are the garden and the churchyard, the lower notes are the nave and rectory, with the narthex in the middle. Part of the reason that it quiets down towards the end (in the autumn) is because that's when we start to lose chunks of data from the sensors, as a result of the clock circuits breaking (and some other reasons too). The recording covers 140 days, with about 3-4 days going past each second.
We've also created "stained glass windows", one for each logger, with a "tile" for each day. March starts at the top, the bottom is October, and each row is a single week. The colour indicates air temperature (bluer is colder, redder is warmer) -- and we can see the seasons changing most dramatically for the two sensors that are outside (in the garden and the churchyard). Each tile has also been made slightly "smoky", with a darker colour for days with an especially high PM10 reading. The clear white tiles are days that we weren't able to collect data due to sensor malfunctions.
Get Involved
We’d love to hear your reflections on this experiment! What does it make you think of? How does it make you feel?
Please email us via our Contact Us form.
If you're interested in doing something creative with the data we've collected, please do talk to us too! You can reach Jonathan and Jana via Contact Us form. We would especially like to incorporate this into liturgy or music in some way.
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