The question of what music to listen to while gazing at the clouds has finally been solved. Nicolas Reeves, a professor at the University of Quebec in Montreal, Canada, has invented The Cloud Harp – an instrument that creates music from the shape of the clouds above it. So far, it has played in six cities around the world – Amos and Montreal (Canada), Lyon (France), Hamburg (Germany), Gizycko (Poland), and Pittsburgh (US).

When the sky is blue, the harp is silent, but with the first appearance of clouds above it, the music begins. “It uses a lidar,” explains Reeves, “which is a laser beam directed at the clouds. Whatever bounces back to the instrument is measured and gives us an idea of the brightness of the cloud, as well as its height.” A controller, known as a ‘cloudist’, configures the instrument so that this information triggers and controls particular musical sounds. He then leaves it to play the music of the clouds to passers by.

Sometimes musicians are brought in to provide orchestrations by recording the samples that the harp plays.“It means that we can play the clouds of St Louis, Missouri, through an arrangement by Helmut Finski of Montreal,” explains Reeves.

In Amos, in Northern Quebec, the Cloud Harp was installed in the clearing of a park, surrounded by trees. “When there was a full moon,” Reeves remembers, “people brought their sleeping bags and stayed the night next to the harp. They just lay there listening to the clouds – it was fantastic.”

See more about The Cloud Harp at
www.cloudharp.org.

We were very excited to be contacted by the one and only John Day of Oregon, USA. He is commonly known as the Cloudman, as he has devoted his latter years to photographing, enthusing about and explaining the clouds. His website is full of fantastic images and information. We recommend it highly.
Indeed, eagle-eyed cloudspotters will notice that society founder, Gavin Pretor-Pinney, was filmed reading John Day’s book in the first of his short programmes about clouds and the Morning Glory. The fact that he fell asleep having read it should not be taken as evidence that it is anything other than a great book.
Visit John Day’s website:http://www.cloudman.com

Soon-to-be-member, John Diefenbach, is based in Japan and has filmed the world’s last mainline steam trains, which operate in Inner Mongolia. Filming in mid-winter, with temperatures down to -30C, the steam effects, in some cases, are spectacular. We told him that we are cloudspotters, not train spotters, but it is fair to say that there is not much difference between what comes out of the train’s funnel and a time-lapse image of a cumulus cloud. Similar to the case of the UPS cloud stamps mentioned below, John’s films will be the ultimate for cloud enthusiasts who are also train nerds.
See John’s films at:
http://www.bachsitetoo.com

We were contacted recently by the venerable Jack Borden, Boston TV news reporter turned sky enthusiast. At the age of 45 he woke up from a nap in a nature preserve to see a sky he had never experience in all his previous life. “In a millisecond I saw more of the sky than in all my life to that point,” he says. He decided to quit his job and become a missionary of the sky. For Spacious Skies is the campaign he’s been running for twenty years or so to get school children and everyone else to pay more attention to what’s going on above us.
http://www.forspaciousskies.com/

If you are a cloudspotter who collects stamps, prepare to have an orgasm. The US Postal Service has issued a set of stamps starring fifteen different types of cloud. All basic genera are featured except, that is, for the nimbostratus. But then it is a bit of a wet, wingey cloud, so we guess it’s fair enough.

There’s nothing quite as mesmerizing as watching time-lapse clouds.