Making Music From Seismic Activity Or Ocean Data

What does seismic activity sound like? Or ocean pollution for that matter? Scientists noticed that patterns in data can be transformed into sound and even music. This week, two different performances demonstrated how patterns in data can sometimes become more interesting when they’re presented as music.

Domenico Vicinanza is a researcher at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, UK, as well as a composer. One of his specialties is data sonification – turning numbers and measurements into sound. Those sounds can be used to create music and that’s what he demonstrated on Tuesday May 9th at the Internet2 Community Exchange conference in Atlanta.

While on stage at the meeting, Vicinanza accessed live seismographic data from Yellowstone National Park, collected by the US Geological Survey. Using a computer program that he developed, this data was turned into sheet music, which was then performed by Alyssa Schwartz, Visiting Assistant Professor of flute and musicology at Fairmont State University.

Vicinanza and Schwartz had previously collaborated by composing works based on data from Yellowstone National Park, but here at the conference they were using live data that they had never seen before. Vicinanza converted the data to sheet music live on stage and Schwartz performed it on flute for the first time in front of the audience.

Schwartz first played through the notes as written, which was essentially a direct mapping of the seismic waves on a music score. Then she played through it again, but this time added her own artistic interpretation, for example by noticing repeated patterns and emphasizing certain sections. Watch a segment of the session below to hear how she did this.

Meanwhile, at the meeting of the Acoustical Society of America this week, Colin Malloy showed how he turned ocean data into a musical performance. Malloy was the 2022 artist in residence at Ocean Network Canada and used his time there to create percussion music based on ocean measurements.

In “Oil and Water”, Malloy introduced noise to represent oil entering the water. The piece demonstrates that over the course of the last 120 years, oil production increased in recent decades. The video below is a performance of this piece at another event earlier this year.

Turning data into music, whether it’s from seismic activity or ocean measurements, provides a very different experience than seeing the same information in figures or graphs. It can make patterns more noticeable, or illustrate how processes change over time.

“We can listen to patterns, we can identify patterns. Our ears are so good at doing that,” said Vicinanza ahead of his talk in Atlanta. “That’s how music can start helping scientists. Imagine a blind scientist, who can do science investigations using music.”

Creating music from data can also bring scientific information to new audiences. In a statement to the Acoustical Society of America, Malloy said “I hope that in listening to these pieces, people use them as a space to reflect on what each piece is trying to portray. Ultimately, I’d like for them to help create awareness of the various issues surrounding the oceans.”