Producer Ike Sriskandarajah asked if there was any way we could illustrate the craziness of the changes in Oklahoma’s rate of earthquakes in the past 10 years.
So I ran earthquake catalog data that I downloaded from the Northern California Earthquake Data Center through some code I wrote to translate the time and magnitude of each quake into MIDI notes. Each “plink” you hear in the recording is a single earthquake in Oklahoma. The lower the pitch and the louder the note, the bigger the earthquake.
Then our sound engineer Jim Briggs, who is a for-real composer, ran those notes through a synthesizer to add more musicality. Take a listen:
You can hear me and host Al Letson talk more about the data behind our “Oklahoma’s man-made earthquakes” story on the June episode of Reveal.
Michael Corey can be reached at mcorey@revealnews.org. Follow him on Twitter: @mikejcorey.