Listening to the Solid Earth

Earthtunes is a mobile App that helps you listen to normally inaudible sounds within the Earth beneath us. These sounds are caused by seismic waves and are so low in frequency that our ears do not hear them. Most of these seismic waves are weak and continuously generated by a range of environmental sources. Some of these seismic waves are strong and caused by earthquakes.

If you’ve ever played videos at twice the speed, you will have noticed that the pitch of the video’s sound went up as well. Earthtunes lets you listen to the Earth’s seismic waves by increasing their pitch. Two hours of seismic data translates to several seconds of sound.

We hope you find these sounds as fascinating as we do. As seismologists we are working to understand what these sounds mean, it’s like learning a foreign language without a dictionary. While we have learned a lot over the past 100 years, many mysteries remain.