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

Ableton Live Instrument : Bald Eagle and Male Vocal Cross-Synthesized

Seraphim is a multisample Ableton Live instrument created by cross-synthesizing a North American Bald Eagle with a male vocal. The resulting sound was then put through a long decay resonator whose center frequency follows the chromatic pitch.

Seraphim by Micah Frank 

1) Download the audio content by clicking the download (arrow) icon in the SoundCloud player.

2) Download the Live Instrument Rack 
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/538153/LiveSounds/Seraphim.adg

3) The first time you instance the rack, Live will tell you “Media files are missing” You must relink the multisample file to the instrument.