Sounding the Alarm: Data Sonification, Time Compression, and the Representation of Slow Crisis

Quran Karriem will discuss three of his audiovisual installations, each of which incorporate datasets and models related to large-scale “slow moving” social crises into algorithmic compositions. His 2017 work titled “a machine for grieving” incorporates the Washington Post’s “Fatal Force” dataset alongside real-time language construction techniques and text-to-speech processes to memorialize each recorded individual killed in deadly encounters with U.S. police since January 1, 2015. “A Timeline for the End of Time” (2022) is a quadraphonic, four-projector media ecology work that incorporates live, auto-tuned tweets about apocalypse and conspiracy into algorithmic music composition techniques. Finally, Dr. Karriem will share work in progress on an as-yet-untitled interactive music composition for a museum installation set to open in February 2026. The piece incorporates modeling from the En-ROADS Climate Solutions Simulator developed at MIT. The installation prompts hand-on exploration of a range of climate and energy policies and predictively forecasts their aggregate impact on global temperature change by the year 2100. Karriem’s interactive composition and soundscape relies on a number of techniques, such as frequency modulation, wavefolding, Markov chains, recurrent neural networks, and Euclidean algorithms to dynamically respond to input from exhibit visitors. Soothing tones, orchestration, and melodies represent sustainable climate futures, and yet exist within the same continuity as harsh inharmonic modulations and noises that indicate a need to change course.