An earthquake “catalog” is the list of time, location, magnitude, depth and other parameters describing the energy released by the earthquake. We generate dots and synchronous sounds marking each event, to generate movies with soundtracks for a region and time window, such as these:
Tohoku: vimeo.com/153547571
Haiti: vimeo.com/153547570
The sounds for each earthquake magnitude are sampled from small aftershocks of sonified data from the Mag6.6 Niigata, Japan earthquake of 2007. With increasing depth, we filter out increasing amounts of high frequency energy to give the impression of attenuation of waves as they travel from greater depths in the earth towards the surface where they are recorded.
Ben Holtzman, Douglas Repetto, Jason Candler, Nolan Lem CC seismicsoundlab.org