The Sound Beneath Our Feet is a collaboration between Edinburgh Napier University and the University of Edinburgh that brings together disciplines of geosciences, creative computing and music in working with seismic data from two volcanic eruptions in Ecuador in 2013 and 2016.

Processes in the Earth, underpinning the occurrence of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, generate seismic waves at frequencies well below the threshold of human hearing. By speeding up playback, this data becomes trivially audible and we are able to perceive the macro (e.g. months’ worth of data) and the micro (i.e. single seismic events). The project explores creative applications of this data in multiple dimensions of space, time, frequency and amplitude through immersive audio outputs.

The project team is:

Professor Haftor Medbøe, Edinburgh Napier University (PI)
Dr. Andrew Bell, University of Edinburgh (Co-I)
Dr. Iain McGregor, Edinburgh Napier University (Co-I)
Harry Docherty (MA Music), Edinburgh Napier University (RA)

The Sound Beneath Our Feet is funded by Creative Informatics, Edinburgh Futures Institute