Micah Frank | Sound Programming

Sonification of Earthquakes off the Coast of Honshu, Japan - Friday March 11, 2011

Earthquakes off the east coast of Honshu, Japan - Friday March 11, 2011 by Micah Frank

Sonification of the incredible seismic activity off the coast of Honshu, Japan - Friday March 11th.

This is only a selection of 20 or so individual readings. At the time of this recording, earthquakes are ongoing as there have been almost 40 readings in the past 8 hours.

UPDATE: As more readings come in that result in interesting generations I will post throughout the day on SoundCloud: http://soundcloud.com/micahfrank

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.

Learn more about Tectonic at http://micahfrank.com/tagged/tectonic

Junction Sonifications as Generated by Max & Kyma

Junction Sonifications by Aurchinaut

Aurchinaut SoundCloud page now has some of the Junction generations from the past few weeks. Some of them are individual NYC intersections, others represent the entire grid. Each generation captures only a few minutes of the ongoing sculpture.