Music played by the atmosphere.

Seven historic skies. The weather balloons that flew into them are the instruments.

A slow build around the Moore tornado, with a hush where the balloon record goes quiet.
A rising, echoing sound as Hurricane Laura approaches and the balloon launches stop.
Restless pulses and sweeping tones follow changing winds during the 2011 tornado outbreak.
Glass-like tones grow into strings and horns through Oregon’s June 2021 heat wave.
Cold, thin tones follow the warming of the high atmosphere above Finnish Lapland.
Changing winds above Oakland, ending with four bells for four layers in the sky.
Four places, four musical voices. Hear how a different sky changes the same instrument.

Explore more Six experimental pieces

NORMAN, OKLAHOMA 2013-05-20 11:45 UTC SUN 6°

How it works

THE METHOD

How a sounding is made.

Each piece starts with real measurements of the sky, shaped into music. Here is how weather balloons gather those measurements.

NOTE 01

The score

Each track begins as one real flight: a weather balloon carrying a small instrument box, climbing from the ground to the edge of space in about two hours. AEOLIAN plays that flight like a score, bottom to top. The long rising sweep you hear in every track is the climb itself.

Golden cumulus clouds rising over a prairie — FIG. 01 · CUMULUS OVER THE PRAIRIE, GOLDEN HOUR

NOTE 02

The mapping

Three measurements shape the sound the whole way up. Temperature sets the pitch: as the balloon climbs into colder air, the tone falls with it. Wind opens and closes the voice, like breath through an instrument. Humidity adds air and texture. These weather-driven sounds sit inside a composed arrangement.

Fine cirrus clouds crossing a soft dusk sky — FIG. 02 · CIRRUS AT DUSK

A sunlit thunderhead towering into a blue sky — FIG. 03 · SUNLIT THUNDERHEAD

NOTE 03

The bells

When a flight crosses a real layer of the atmosphere, a bell rings at its true height. The freezing level rings first, a few kilometres up. The tropopause, where weather ends, rings near the top of the climb. In Four Skies, the final sounding found four tropopauses stacked above Oakland, and you hear all four, one after another, as the track closes.

NOTE 04

Written and played

The weather shapes the electronic voices; the harmony and arrangement are written around them. In Forty-Five Seven, strings and horns join the original weather sounds, with violin phrases shaped by temperature and wind. The near-silence in The Twentieth of May is the hour of the tornado, which no balloon can record. The endless rise in The Last Launch is the final balloon out of Lake Charles before Hurricane Laura, climbing again and again.

TEMPERATUREPITCH

WINDTONE

HUMIDITYBREATH

LAYERSBELLS

A tiny weather balloon still climbing among golden clouds — FIG. 04 · STILL CLIMBING

8 STATIONS · 205 SOUNDINGS · 7 TRACKS · 48 KHZ