Earthtunes is making waves (pun intended) in local and international news! Throughout the month of November, the Earthtunes App has made appearances in Northwestern University News Stories, CBS news Chicago, various tech blogs, and even NPR’s Science Friday. This uptick in publicity can be attributed to Earthunes’ audio translations of Iceland’s recent seismic activity in the Reykjanes peninsula.
Iceland’s recent volcanic and seismic activity have people curious, once again, about the mesmerizing nature of our dynamic Earth. Pairing Iceland’s current events with Earthtunes sonification of the seismic waves has people’s interest piqued even higher. In a recent Northwestern News Story, Amanda Morris, Senior Science and Engineering Editor at Northwestern University, creates a description of Iceland’s recent activity in Earthtunes that evokes an alarming sense of harsh discordance and chaos.
“So far, Iceland’s recent, ongoing seismic activity sounds like a jarring symphony of doors slamming, hail pelting against a tin roof or window and people cracking trays of ice cubes.”
In a CBS News Interview, Suzan Van Der Lee, Seismologist at Northwestern University, explained how Earthtunes works in a way most people with a basic understanding of waves can understand.
“Seismic waves are all around us, the earth is in constant vibration – due to things like Earthquakes and the weather and ocean currents, etc. – Let’s say we take a day of these recordings so that’s 24 hours. We keep all these wiggles in these recordings the same and we pretend they were recorded in 12 hours, and then we cut that in half again, and make it six hours, and three hours, and every time we do that, we effectively increase their frequency by a factor of 2, [this] essentially increases their pitch by an octave every time we do that halving of the time period and we do that until we can hear them.”
Stay tuned for more Earthtunes Updates.