Flows to Bay
Intro: The single biggest energy consumer in California is the state’s water supply system. The state pumps millions of liters of water from the Sierra Nevada and the Colorado River to its coastal population centers every hour. After brief usage, what is now wastewater flows to wastewater treatment plants. From there, it flows out into the ocean.
Most of the water from the mountains would flow to the ocean naturally… just not this way, that fast, and so dirty. To show a part of this massive flow, Niemeyer sonified and visualized a year’s worth of water data (2020) from his home town, Richmond CA as a short data music video. He combined the visual and sonic data manifestations with a long 360˚ video pan he filmed at the West County Wastewater District’s Water Quality and Resource Reclamation Plant in Richmond. The resulting music video aka Data Panorama was first presented at the 2021 Water Inspiration event in Ghent, Netherlands.
Below is a recording of this wonderful Water Webinar on Inspiration hosted by Christel Stalpaert from Ghent University. In what way can art make us see, feel and think differently? She says: “Greg Niemeyer visualizes data through sound. Flows to Bay is a sonification of three related data streams: Sea water levels, sewage, and rain in a particular city. Converting data into music establishes a poetic view of the data. This may not stop the next drought or flood, but it emphasizes a human interconnectedness with water through an auditory experience.”
Process: Making this video required exploratory data analysis, photography, animation and sound synthesis. The four processes all are interdependent, because in the end, they all need to come together into a durational whole, a durational entity. Niemeyer handled data from four separate sources in python, filling in NaN data, fixing timestamp errors, and harmonizing all the time series. In the end, he generated a time series with 8784 data points (one for every hour over 366 days] for sea levels, rain levels, wastewater inflow and wastewater outflow.
He brought this data into processing as a .csv file and converted it into a handy data object. He based all animations and sound syntheses on the data, showing row of the data every 1/30 of a second. He introduced rhythmic structures based on the seven days a week, and he tuned arrays of sine oscillators to produce the sounds based on the data levels. There is a wave voice, a wastewater voice for the hourly levels, a second wastewater voice for the daily averages, and a rain voice. The four graphic elements are three time series graphs and a rain graphic, all animated by the data, frame by frame.
In a last synthesis step, Niemeyer layered the graphics and the sound onto the on-site video in After Effects. He left the original sound of the video in the mix, because it added depth. The recorded sound anchored the synthetic sounds in its richer timbre.
The resulting music video of sorts seeks to show how water operates at different time scales. It’s a poetic reading of big climate change data. Water is at the same time a compound older than the solar system. It is also what most of us consider fresh and refreshing, more than anything else. It is also what we consider most repulsive when mixed with the fats, germs and proteins of human waste. How can we not revere water in all its forms?
Manifesting Big Climate Data in Poetic Sound: Only through poetic language are we able to touch upon the complexity of the current crises. Only through poetic language can we open our hearts to the life-granting force of water and to the fragility of our environment with compassion and care.
The project’s title, “Flows to Bay” comes from ubiquitous Bay Area signage which reminds us not to dump waste in the storm drains and to stop polluting the Bay. The Bay still is contaminated with mercury runoff from the gold rush mining period, and wildlife populations are at a fraction of pre-Gold Rush era.
Thanks: This video production depended entirely on access to both the West County Wastewater (WCW) District site and data. Special thanks to WCW’s Susan Pan, Geraldine Gonzales, and Roy Castillo for their support and help. The artist also wishes to acknowledge that Richmond, CA is on unceded Native American land as is the Hetch Hetchy aqueduct which delivers fresh water to the Bay Area.