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100 Years of Earthquake Data Becomes an 8-Day-Long Orchestral Arrangement

David Johnson created a program that built an orchestra composition from a century of seismic waves.
Images courtesy the artist

If the Earth's tremors were performed by a full orchestra, it might sound like creative technologist David Johnson’s “data auralizations.” Using 100 years of global earthquake data—a set that consists of over 780,000 points—he created The Poseidon Ensemble, a generative orchestral composition and visual animation that runs for nearly eight days from beginning to end.

“We hear data when we hear drum patterns and chord progressions, so I set about trying to apply the same principles to a more unpredictable dataset,” Johnson explained to The Creators Project. Finding it strange that his home state of Victoria, Australia was experiencing a high number of strong earthquakes in a short amount of time, he dug into seismic information from all over the globe to investigate if this was an anomaly.

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In The Poseidon Ensemble, Johnson’s program divides the world into eight regions that are assigned a particular group of instruments. Each group has its own special role: the double bass and cello chime in when there’s an earthquake in Alaska, a bassoon sings when there’s one in Australia, a trio of french horns, timpanis and tubas blast when earthquakes with a magnitude greater than eight occur. “The challenge I faced was giving the listener as much information about a seismic event as possible in only a single note, so I set about experimenting with different techniques,” he adds.

Test render

Johnson used Processing, a virtual MIDI port, and Ableton Live to create his preliminary compositions. Because MIDI notes could only deviate in channel, pitch, and velocity, he decided the event’s magnitude would be the velocity of the note and length of a note, with a sound that was longer and louder with a larger earthquake. The pitch correlated with the depth of the earthquake.

The program would start by reading a CSV file of every earthquake since 1900, generating a note from each data point and filling up a queue. Thus as the composition began to play from the queue, each note created a visual in the form of an animated circle.

In the process of creating The Poseidon Ensemble, Johnson found out earthquakes on opposite sites on the globe “ping pong” between each other for hours or days. “This doesn't happen all the time, but when it does it really stands out,” he says. He also discovered that, though there are many times when everything is quiet and still, “the Earth likes to have rhythm.” And as for the earthquakes in Victoria? In the context of the music of 100 years of seismic activity, he realized that the strong, successive quakes close to home were indeed out of the ordinary.

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Johnson has invited designers, programmers, and musicians to take his code, sketches, and data from Github to create their own interpretations. He also offered some inspiration of his own: "I would love to hear a Dubstep or Glitch version!"

Listen to a 6-hour-long track of every earthquake in 2014 here and learn more about The Poseidon Ensemble here.

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