What the Japanese Earthquake Sounded Like
Posted by Alec_Liu on Saturday, Mar 12, 2011
Micah Frank, a New York based sound programmer has created a haunting sonification of the Japanese earthquake using Tectonic to map the seismic activity.
Tectonic is a realtime seismic analysis and sound synthesis system. Sound is created in realtime by earthquakes as they occur across the globe. A tightly integrated system between Max/MSP, Google Earth and Symbolic Sound’s Kyma processes earthquake data that is translated into sound synthesis parameters. A USGS XML feed is parsed into numerous fields including magnitude, elevation, time of day and geographical coordinates. These data are mapped to synthetic spectrums and processed by granular, aggregate and subtractive synthesis.
This is eerie stuff. You can hear the terror when the rhythms shift.
Earthquakes off the east coast of Honshu, Japan – Friday March 11, 2011 by Micah Frank
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