The Music of Earthquakes mixes performance and lecture, music and science, acoustic instruments and computer generated sounds.

A musician controls the source of the sound and the path it travels through their instrument in order to make sound waves that we hear as music. An earthquake is the source of waves that travel along a path through the earth until reaching us as shaking. It is almost as if the earth is a musician and people, including seismologists, are the audience who must try to understand what the music means.

By listening to both music and the audio playbacks of the earth shaking, we will explore this analogy and find new ways to learn about the earth, earthquakes, musical instruments and music.

This lecture has been a popular feature at the USGS in Menlo Park, several Universities, and was an invited presentation at a symposium on science and art organized by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, at Moscone Hall in San Francisco during the 1999 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

As part of the lecture a piece of music "Earthquake Quartet #1" has been composed for voice, trombone, cello, and seismograms. For more information on this piece go to Andrew Michael's home page and select "Earthquake Quartet."