Scorched Earth by Miriam Quick

Wildfires around the world are getting more ferocious and harder to control, as climate changes fuels more extreme heat. In unusually hot, dry seasons like the summer of 2018 in Sweden, the number and size of fires starts to outstrip humans’ ability to respond and cope.

Scorched Earth is an audiovisual artwork based on daily fire counts from the county of Skåne, Sweden for 2018. It includes elements of data sonification and audio-reactive visuals. The sound palette takes inspiration from horror movie soundtracks, folk music and 20th-century string music.

Each passing day of data is represented by one second of sound. At the start of each new data week (every seven seconds in the music), you hear a deep string sound and a new ‘tree ring’ on the animated graphic is added.

Every click sound represents one of 747 fires that started somewhere in Skåne that year. There are three different types of click, depending on whether the fire was caused naturally (for example because of lightning strikes), because of human activity (fires started deliberately or by accident), or from unknown causes. There are more clicks in the middle part of the track because most fires started in summer, and fewer in spring, autumn and winter.

The area of land that was burned by fire is represented in two different ways. Firstly, a rumbling sound in the background – like the roar of a fire – gets louder and harsher, the larger the area burned each day. You only hear this sound when the area burned is above a certain threshold. Most fires are small, so it is not there all the time. But when there are large fires, it can be very loud. In the animation, the thickness of each weekly tree ring added is determined by the loudness of the roar, so that weeks where lots of land burned have thicker rings.

Secondly, the cumulative area burned over the whole year is represented using a scale, played on strings. It starts low in pitch but then, as the area burned grows, more notes are added to the scale and the strings stack up higher and higher over the course of the track, mirroring the cumulative strain fires place on services, infrastructure and people’s lives. The notes linger on right to the end of the track, the way fires leave an area of scorched earth behind, even after they’ve gone out. Fifty-two rings have now been added to the graphic – one for each week of the year. They block out the entire screen.

Scorched Earth was commissioned for the Nature’s Harmony exhibition in Helsingborg, Sweden, in 2024.