A chilling aural portrait of the deadly earthquake near Japan
“Images of a rising tide washing over coastlines, swallowing boats and sweeping away neighborhoods have painted an indelible portrait of the destruction wrought by Japan’s 8.9-magnitude earthquake.
But what about the sounds? What would an earthquake sound like if we could hear it?
Micah Frank, a sound programmer from Brooklyn, has attempted to answer that question by producing aural interpretations of the seismic activity from Japan’s earthquake. Frank is the founder of the Tectonic Project, which aggregates earthquake data from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and turns it into sound sculptures in real time. These soundscapes paint a chilling aural portrait of disasters like the one in Japan.”
Interviewed by PBS about my earthquake sonification project, Tectonic, and the sounds it created during the Japan earthquakes of 2011.