Listen to this story

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.

Don’t miss a Reveal podcast   

Michael Corey can be reached at mcorey@revealnews.org. Follow him on Twitter: @mikejcorey.

Creative Commons License

Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.

Michael Corey is a former senior data editor. He led a team of data journalists who seek to distill large datasets into compelling and easily understandable stories using the tools of journalism, statistics and programming. His specialties include mapping, the U.S.-Mexico border, scientific data and working with remote sensing. Corey's work has been honored with an Online Journalism Award, an Emmy Award, a Polk Award, an IRE Medal and other national awards. He previously worked for the Des Moines Register and graduated from Drake University.