carmelo pampillonio seismic reel.wav

Created by Carmelo Pampillonio for use in the Make Noise Morphagene.

Seismic waves unfurl across the surface of the Earth at massive magnitudes over deep geologic time; their ripples slowly circumnavigating across the breadth of the entire planet multiple times before dimming out. The easiest way to transpose seismic waves into sound and render them audible to human hearing is to play them at a much faster speed via a time-frequency transform. I consider this, along with my work with VLF waves, to be documentary practices, where I leave the sounds completely raw and unedited to preserve the general characteristics of the vibrations as much as possible. The act of rendering these waves sensible requires an adjustment — or attunement — of our intuitions of time and scale to degrees which exceed what is generally considered normal and familiar. Conversions like this help us to slide up and down different spatiotemporal dimensions to consider things from varying viewpoints. They allow for a sort of perspectival superposition, where it’s both the sped-up time and the original, and neither nor. So, for me, this listening is part of a practice of long-term deep-geologic thinking, and it’s a practice that helps articulate our situatedness on the earth, and our entanglement within these large-scale nonhuman forces. It’s very much a process; a material working-out of the relations between entities and forces, and how we’re co-produced through these interactions. The pieces you hear here were sonified via the three-axis L-4 seismometer at the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute (PARI), in Rosman, North Carolina.

Part of the “Geophysical Vibrations” Reel pack.

See a video about Carmelo’s process here: https://youtu.be/NN38OyBGEQo