Hearing Climate Change: William Cheng Discusses NASA Project

For Harvard Radcliffe Institute News, writer Sam Zuniga-Levy spoke with Professor William Cheng about his upcoming NASA-funded collaboration that pairs climate crisis data with music. Cheng, who was Radcliffe's 2022–2023 Rita E. Houser Fellow, is working with fellow Radcliffe Institute alums Hong Yang (an earth scientist) and Narges Mahyar (a visualization expert) to develop an innovative, accessible presentation about the climate crisis. The project, funded by the NASA Rhode Island Space Grant Consortium, will use "innovative musical, artistic, and multisensory storytelling" to communicate data on the climate crisis to a broad audience.

Cheng, quoted in the article, hopes the team can identify "data and messages about climate change that are resistant to traditional modes of presentation. Things that are especially challenging to convey, such as the rate of change, the intensity of change, the cataclysmic possibilities of a near future." Overall, the article quotes him, the team is "thinking metaphorically and figuratively and also gesturally and affectively about a whole picture approach to a performance that is not just about conveying information, not just about eliciting emotion, but something that combines the two."

The full article is available here.