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Researchers Make Mount Etna Sing
The Interfacer writes "Predicting eruptions will become easier now scientists are using technology to translate the patterns in a volcano's behaviour into sound waves.
"The research project, which brings together experts from Europe and Latin America, digitally collects geophysical information on seismic movements before using data sonification to transform them into audible sound waves, which can then be 'scored' as melodies. The resulting 'music' is then analysed for patterns of behaviour and used to identify similarities in eruption dynamics and so predict future activity."
[Insert obligatory American Idol joke here.]
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
But will the volcano run linux?
Big Etna? BIG ETNA? You sound like a broken record. Why are you so afraid of that pathetic tub of lard?
oh right... it's a volcano.
Pattern analysis? Revolutionary.
Anybody got a torrent?
(and as an aside, why are we subjected to PR?)
"I feel the earth... move... under my feet..."
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
These 'making music out of nature' studies always remind me of that space ship in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams. Where the ship was anaylysing all the maths of the planet, and turning it into beautiful music which was then given to one of the classical composers.
Having listened to the Etna sounds though its not quite Mozart. Both the audios are at the bottom of the article and not slashdotted yet. It'd be cool if they could explain what was happening at what points in the melodies. Also sounds a little like a 3-year old smashing a keyboard.
I imagine the vibration described here would sound like a large gong.
Or maybe a bell. Ask not for whom the bell tolls...
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
I'm thinking the "convert raw data to music and then extract valuable data from music" step is just in there to ooh and ahh the grant boards. How can that be more efficient than just looking at the raw data?
Pattern recognition can be done without translating it into something audible. The pattern is there, regardless of the frequency range. This sounds like BS to me...
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Mad Scientist: "Now, repeat after me..."
"Please, no more virgins. They give me indigestion. Especially the blonds."
Table-ized A.I.
Wtf? anyway, whats up with this story. Why is it worth mentioning this here? I don't understand why this should be relevant to post the fact that some scientists are having a buzz over some volcano's frequences. There sure must be some better stories to tell right now. Getting mainstream i suppose. Must help with the sponsoring :D
Now let's find out when that underground volcanic chamber beneath Yellowstone will erupt! That sucker is one of the two largest chambers of lava in the world! It's a time bomb, so why not study that, too?!
--I gots 99 problems but a new machine ain't one!
AMD! Asus! Whoot! 6 years!
How is what they're talking about not some subset of fourier analysis? Come on, recasting the data as sound waves? You mean, shifting the frequency domain from ELF to human-audible? What in the world is the point?
They must be using some software package originally written for audio guys, and are unaware that the "conversion" they are talking about is conceptually nothing more than editing the sampling rate constant in the datafile.
I am never surprised at the dearth of researchers competent in data analysis in our country.
It can be less efficient. It's not like they care, they're fucking around all day and collecting a paycheck while the rest of us pay to support them. Although they did invent the term "sonification technology" so at least they're providing us with a little entertainment. I know I laughed when I read that line. What a bunch of pure bullshit.
And now, a whole new kind of free-form jazz!
I make websites and stuff. Buy one.
And incidentally DANTE seems oblivious that the Dante project by NASA was a multilegged robot descending by rope into a volcanic crater.
I don't mean to overshadow their scientific achievements but lack of memory by networked prdroids bugs me.
Does this mean the fat lady has sung?
Joe Satriani's Mountain Song sounds much better.
Obviously not a well-tempered mountain. Fb is normally rendered as "E" and has been since Bach's time.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
what benefit does converting one set of data into audible data? can't they find patterns from the original data they've gathered. I personally don't see the scientific benefit of translating existing data into a melody just to find patterns. Were they not able to find patterns in the original data?
HD Trailers
They presumably mapped the ELF input to musical tones, not just changed the sampling rate. That represents significant data squashing or smoothing, which is a good thing for several reasons.
In any event, they're doing predictive time-domain analysis. The state of the art in that field is wavelet analysis, though the Kalman filter seems quite a bit of use in applications. These guys are surely aware of what a Fourier analysis is, what it isn't, and why this is different.
After all, I am strangely colored.
spent some time searching for samples, here they are:
WMA SOUND SAMPLE
or like this REAL PLAYER SAMPLE
Wonderboy... hee hee...
My mom says I'm cool.
Most (not all but most) news consists of 3 things. Official government spokespeople issuing press releases, text or verbal. Same with business news, same with academic/scientific news. Reporters rearrange it, then they take some photos around the scene of the press releases, or just standup and look concerned and sincere and re-read it slightly different if it's TV news.
It's on the internet, all the kids are talking about it. That's called "blog news", which is discussing that previous stuff.
Now that you know that and your bubble is busted about where news comes from, you can go back to nascar and wrestling. Or whatever.
I don't mean to be rude, but you shouldn't attempt to rebut someone unless you know what you're talking about. The criticism I was leveling at their work was specifically aimed at comparing their method of "mapping to musical tones," to being conceptually little more than changing the sampling rate.
Actually I should have gone further, and pointed out how it's actually very destructive to the original data due to it being a convolution with many presumptive kernels (and therefore NOT smoothing). .
...with the sound of music.
Literally.
Whatever that might mean...
Je me souviens.
My conclusion from the article is that the supercomputer with huge arrays of CPUs still fails compared to our slow and limited brains.
Assuming the brain is the best DSP around, at least when it comes to pattern recognition, it is a choice that at assures you a job as well.
Only problem, how to interface the brain to all the seismic data etc. Well, the brain has two hi-speed inputs: vision (100Mb/s) and hearing (10Mb/s)
The seismic data is less than 1Mb/s so it is a ok match.
Now, just create the interface. This must include a modulation of the data that is optimized for the targeted brain to process.
I guess modulate to music, and use a musicians brain is a decent choice.
"Fix it"
I wanted to be a Lumberjack!
Alright sure I'm willing to buy that representing information in sound can sometimes be more evocative or make for a better presentation but it hardly counts as an important scientific advancement.
I mean this is like having a press release for the pie chart talking about how it is going to revolutionize research in economics.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
"Researchers Make Mount Etna Sing"
Yes, but can they make it dance.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Cheers.
Few people know Mt. Etna emits some 30,000,000 kilograms of CO2 per day, and is the single largest CO2 source on the planet.
I suggested the transformation of seismic trace and oil log data to an audible form, since the discrimination of hearing might reveal information that than the usual visual representation did not. Not much was done, but as noted, the idea's been raised before.
Seismic data is usually represented in a "trace" format: tens or hundreds of traces visually graphed alongside one another - each trace being a single wavelike patterns on the screen. But hearing the individual traces (and sequentially hearing spatially-adjacent traces) would likely reveal detail not necessarily easily detected by the eye. Also, standard mathematical processing of these traces relies on "linearizing" an essentially nonlinear model. So the result is an approximation in which some details are omitted. Listening to the unprocessed trace may reveal hitherto-unrevealed nonlinear details indicating underground structure of significance.
It's like having a new sense or a sense with extended range. Would it be useful to you if you had an internal compass so that you could always detect true North, even when inside a building? Do you think that having the acute hearing of a deer would be useful? What if you could see in the dark without night vision goggles? Would any of these be useful?
...in a duo with celine dion!
I wonder if the volcano will have DRM.
Nah that would just blow in their faces...
What in the world is the point?
I suppose it's to be able to better feed it to one of the most powerful processors for pattern recognition on linear data, available at this time. That would happen to be the human ear. Which in fact is so surprisingly capable that certain competing systems seem pretty laughable in comparison. It remains to be seen, whether this conversion will truely turn out to be helpful, but it's quite definitely worth a try.
... how about a farting noise?
as someone who relies on just such a method to determine if I am picking up nerve activity or not, I nod in agreement. But, it's worth a try, not a separate grant, or even an entire project.