Earthquakes in music

I already have written about earthquake records transformed into music (here and here). However, I did not realized that earthquakes could also have inspired music compositions. As I was reading The Melodies of Monsoons: Weather in Indian Classical Music, I was wondering if earthquakes also inspired classical music. 

And, certainly, a few works have been composed after these natural disasters. Among them, the beginning of Handel’s Messiah and Telemann’s Die Donnerode. The later particularly interests me because it was inspired by the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. 

The Lisbon earthquake struck in the height of the Age of Enlightenment. Two opposing ideas, the orthodox religiousness, and the prevalence of the reason, tried to explain such a natural disaster. It inspired Voltaire’s Candide, which would be later transformed into a Bernstein’s operetta, and a strong debate about the existence or not of a benevolent deity. Rousseau found in this earthquake grounds for returning to the natural life, far from the cities. The Lisbon earthquake inspired the creation of the Portuguese fados (fate), so embedded now into their culture. And here I leave you, with Amália Rodrigues:

Inge Lehmann

Today Google remembers the birth of Inge Lehmann with their doodle. Inge Lehmann is the most well-known female seismologist in history. Thanks to her interpretation of seismograms, we now know that the Earth’s core has an inner core and an outer core. 

People are so interested in looking at the stars, that most of the time we do not realise how little we know about our own Earth. I do not mean that Astronomy and related sciences are not interesting. But sometimes we forget about our own surroundings. 

Seismology is still not a very well-known science. Surely due to the difficulties of dealing with a lab that is the size of our Earth, and geological time scales, but we keep trying. 

In any case, I am glad that this woman was honoured with a doodle today. 

Happy birthday, Inge Lehmann!

The Poseidon Ensemble

They made a composition with earthquakes. Isn´t it beautiful?

 

The Poseidon Ensemble — 2014 by Struct on Mixcloud

Seen here :)

Visualization of Japan earthquakes in 2011

Very interesting video of the earthquakes in Japan in 2011, when the devastating Tōhoku earthquake occurred. Enjoy!

Earthquake music

The other they we had a visit from a high school student that wanted to study maths or physics. We were explaining him what we did. He said that he also liked music, so we came up with some music related entertainment: fractal music. 

There are some authors that play with physical models and convert it into music, like Xenakis, for example. We played a little bit, and we ended up creating a program that translates fractals into music. Here you have the result: 

We used the MATLAB scripts written by Ken Schutte, but with fractals. This fractal in particular has a Hurst exponent of 0.8. The timing is equal, but we can choose random or fractal timing too.

Then, at home, I thought that it would be cool to create a movie with an earthquake. The result is this: 

This is what the Lorca (Spain) 2011 earthquake would sound like. The sound is scaled, so this is not a real sound. But I thought it would be nice to see how the earthquake signal could be translated into sound. I am not the first one to think about it. You can look at NOAA , for example. 

Here you have the sound of seismic ambient noise, recorded at Almería (Spain), for a seismic campaign: 

The sound is also scaled.They are very different, don´t you think?

The movies and sounds are nothing special (I don´t think I will win an oscar), but I had fun making them. And I think that´s all that matter. 

Can earthquakes be predicted?

A lot of people ask me if earthquakes can be predicted or not. I am even surprised when somebody thinks that they can be predicted. They think that those deathly events like Haiti or Indonesia kill people because they are poor countries, not because earthquakes are unpredictable. 

The answer to the question "Can earthquakes be predicted" is no. However, it does not mean that we cannot do anything at all. For example, the regulations to construct buildings in places at risk is something where seismologists can and do help. But, can we do better?

Until the L'Aquila event, seismologists approached the topic from the scientific point of view only. Of course everybody knew that it would have a strong social impact if earthquakes could be predicted. But that was only one more reason to research that particular question, not the main one. A positive answer to the predictability of earthquakes would mean that we know the process in detail, and that is what most scientists like: to understand a problem so well that we can do predictions about what is happening next.

However, we are not yet at that stage, and probably we never will. The Earth's crust is what we call a Complex System, and it is chaotic. That means that the whole is much more than the parts, and also that the initial conditions are very important. But the climate is also chaotic, and scientists are able to make climate and weather forecasts. Why do not use this approach too?

Well, earthquake forecasting is a little bit more complex. For starters, we do not know the state of the variables we are interested in. We cannot measure them directly. Also, the time of interest is very large (decades, centuries, even more), and we only have records from the beginning of the twentieth century. We know about other earthquakes in the past, because of reports and geological evidence, but they have many errors and we need more information.

But after the L'Aquila event, where some scientists were prosecuted for not informing the population appropriately, the seismological community is making an effort to provide useful information to the authorities. Jordan et al. (2011), in their paper, made a recompilation of all the models that have been tried to forecast earthquakes. They also highlight the importance an operational forecast has: to give probabilities of occurrence in well established intervals of time, magnitude and space. Even if our models are not very good, we still should give some information of what is happening next.

The problem with the models for forecasting used in the literature is that they have not been properly tested. It is obvious, but until the CSEP (Collaboratory for the Study of Earthquake Predictability) project, no unbiased testing was performed. This project is also an answer to the necessity of having a framework where we can test our forecasts. In that way we can give the best information we can to the authorities.

The REAKT (Strategies and tools for Real Time EArthquake RisK ReducTion) project from the 7th Fremawork, in which I am involved, represents the great effort the scientific community is doing to answer to this societal need. What can be done to reduce the seismic risk in a region? With more than 20 institutions involved from the European Union and abroad, it tackles the problem in a very comprehensive way: from building regulations to early warning, from earthquake forecasting to the communication to the authorities and society.

Can earthquakes be predicted? No, but still we can be useful to society. We are not always in the clouds. Sometimes, we look down to Earth.

(Image from Wikipedia)