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Meditation #3

For this meditation, I made a fairly simple sonification of global earthquake data (obtained from here). The score contains a note for every earthquake with a magnitude of five or higher in the past ten years, played in a compressed amount of time (about 200ms for every hour). The depth of the earthquake corresponds to the note's pitch of the note (deeper depths equate to lower notes) and the magnitude corresponds to the number of overtones. I used csound's adsynt opcode, so the whole thing basically sounds like a mess of Tibetan singing bowls.

Here's the csound file and the python script I used to generate the score. Here's the data file I used (somewhat massaged from the output of the original USGS search).

An excerpt from the piece is included below. You can download the entire piece (192kbps MP3, 2'53") here.


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