From Antonio Graca:
The movie is a 2012 week by week June to November depiction of the water stress distribution in a vineyard in the Upper Douro Valley.
Colours relate to the amount of stress measured directly on grapevines (green – no stress; red – disruptive stress, black figures are the measured values (negative as they express the suction the grapevine needs to exert to take water from the soil), red boundaries and vineyard blocks and red letters are symbols for grape varieties: TN – Touriga Nacional; RZ – Tinta Roriz; TF – Touriga Franca; DIV – mixed varieties), drops in blue squares indicate water allocated by drip irrigation to avoid disruptive stress and ensure quality grapes and the blue clouds indicate when we had a rain event, the value in the cloud being locally recorded rainfall in millimetres. The main phenological stages are indicated in the specific moment they were verified: fruitset, veraison, maturity (harvest time), leaf fall.
The main goal of this process is to keep a certain level of stress that is necessary to improve the quality of grapes for high-value wine without risking getting into disruptive values that will ruin quality and may threaten the very life of the plant.
BellHouse playtesting
This is how BellHouse plays it:
Having had some time to think and a discussion with Antonio. I have been playing a little further and have 2 more recordings to add to the mix.
Antonio mentioned that he preferred the second film and I have noticed that often it helps to listen for patterns if there is a looped recording of a shorter piece. I thoght it might help further if I made one so here it is:
It may be useful to have this to listen to almost as a background piece.
I also asked if Antonio had any further animations which might be played with and he was kind enough to supply me with data for the same vineyard & water stress measurements but for the subsequent 3 years. In the following video, I made a film in which I have spliced all four animations together in chronological order. I wanted to hear what a longer passage of time might suggest. Here it is:
I have not yet had time to listen to this properly but my initial impressions are that the years subsequent to 2012 there is less variability in the sound to the extent that it does not play nearly as often. This is asl because in places the time sequences in the original animations vary and so this leaves long gaps.
Having heard the “gaps” in the sounds, I went back to the animations and had another look and it is clear that here is less variability in water stress across the vineyard. I wanted to ask if this was down to climatic conditions or due to the more precise water management that this measuring and modelling process was aiming to achieve.
