Categorization of seismic sources by auditory display: A blind test

15 Recordings of the Earth’s surface oscillation as a function of time (seismograms) can be sonified by compressing time so that most of the signal’s frequency spectrum falls in the audible range. The pattern-recognition capabilities of the human auditory system can then be applied to the auditory analysis of seismic data. In this experiment, we sonify a set of seismograms associated with a magnitude-5.6 Oklahoma earthquake recorded at 17 broadband stations within a radius of ⇠300km from the epicenter, and a group of volunteers listen to our sonified seismic data set via headphones. Most of the subjects have never heard a sonified seismogram before. Given the lack of studies on this subject, we prefer to make no preliminary hypotheses on the categorization criteria employed by the listeners: we follow the “free categorization” approach, asking listeners to simply group sounds that they perceive as “similar.” We find that listeners tend to group together sonified seis...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2016
• Where: IJMMS
• Authors: Arthur Paté, Lapo Boschi, Jean-Loïc Le Carrou, Benjamin Holtzman
• Keywords: IJMMS 2016