MEDITATION 3
MEDITATION 3
The Task: The United States Geological Survey contains an extensive site with data taken from seismic readings. These readings are made available from the National Earthquake Information Center as a public service. The site contains a search engine for seismic data where you can view earthquake data within parameters you specify (magnitude, year, location, etc.). You can also mine the data on a more specific scale by grabbing information from their ftp site. Both engines give you interesting information on earthquakes and their occurrence throughout the world.
Mapping: As we discovered last week when we attempted to sonify the EEG data, mapping is an incredibly important aspect of the composition using data mining. Taking some data from the USGS server, do a musical sketch where you sonify the data using a Csound opcode we've never tried in class (e.g. not oscil, pluck, or soundin). Start off with the Csound example posted at the end of the documentation for the opcode, then write a score to make some sound out of the data. You can use a brief seismic reading which you map note for note, or you can write some code to read a data file into Processing to generate a score.
Instead of data-mining the earthquake database I finally managed to make a Max Patch (thanks to Luke) that takes the data live from a buoy in Indonesia and manipulates an audio file accordingly. It can be output as an oscillator, change the volume or the speed of an audio file, or depending on its events it can trigger different audio samples.
The full patch here:
