the Earth, heard live
Every sound you will hear is a real event on the Earth, published right now by USGS, NASA, GDACS, NOAA and NSIDC, and placed where it happens.
use headphones if you can · touch a dot to see its source · turn your phone for the full mapNothing on this page is invented or simulated. Every point and every sound is a record published by one of these public scientific sources, read again every few minutes. Touch or click any point to open its original record.
Geophonia listens to the Earth as it is reported right now by open scientific feeds. Every sound is a real event, placed where it happens: its latitude is the pitch, its longitude the place in the stereo field.
Earthquakes (USGS, public domain), volcanoes, wildfires, storms, floods and ice (NASA EONET), disaster alerts (GDACS, European Union, CC BY 4.0), solar flares of the last day (NOAA SWPC, drawn as small rays where the Sun stood overhead), the cracking of sea ice against its 1981-2010 average (NSIDC) and, if you switch them on, fighting and attacks found in the world's news (The GDELT Project). Nothing is invented: when the Earth is quiet, so is the page.
The thin amber seams are the boundaries of the tectonic plates (Bird 2003, PB2002, data by Hugo Ahlenius and Nordpil, ODC-BY), where most earthquakes and volcanoes happen. The trace along the bottom is the sound itself, drawn like a seismograph.
Where an event happens decides how it sounds. Latitude is the pitch: the north higher, the south lower, on one musical scale. Longitude is the place in the stereo field: the west on the left, the east on the right. The strength of an event (magnitude, alert level, flare class) is its loudness and its length.
Each kind of event has a voice that follows its physics. An earthquake is a low tone falling into a rumble, darker when it is deeper. A volcano is a roar that grows and bursts. A wildfire crackles, a storm is wind sweeping through a narrow band, a flood rises in bubbles, ice rings like a cold bell, a solar flare is a slow high chord, dust and heat a breath. Fighting is a distant dull thud, an attack a dry crack and a falling boom. Under everything, a low drone swells with the Earth's activity of the last minutes, and when the sea ice is below its 1981-2010 average, the cracking and groaning of melting ice rises with it.
NOW plays each event as it arrives, and every ongoing event once a minute. LOOP 24 H plays the last day in one minute.
A sound work by Francesco Giannico. Also as a Max for Live instrument: francescogiannico.com/tools