ClimaSynth: Enhancing Environmental Perception through Climate Change Sonic Interaction

This paper presents a first prototype of ClimaSynth, a web-based interactive application that allows to creatively transform environmental sounds in response to climate change scenarios. ClimaSynth serves as an instrument for enhancing environmental perception through sonic interaction. The underlying algorithm uses real-time granular synthesis and web technologies to encode climatic effects in sound synthesis configurations in ways that express and speculate about change in future environments. ClimaSynth enables users to navigate and manipulate recorded audio data on a visual surface and produce new versions of environmental sounds. We discuss the design, implementation and resulting relationships between web-based sonic interaction and climate change impacts.