The voice of Utah's arches – Ambient seismic vibration sped up 25x(geohazards.earth.utah.edu) |
The voice of Utah's arches – Ambient seismic vibration sped up 25x(geohazards.earth.utah.edu) |
> this feature and the sounds of its vibration are sacred to Native American Tribes of the four corners region, and they ask that you listen and share with according respect.
Does anyone happen to know if this means they were actually hearing these vibrations in some way? (Only 25 times slower and less audible)
[0] https://geohazards.earth.utah.edu/tones/RainbowBridge.html
It's an incredible arch, but one of the harder ones to get to.
At that time, nobody was particularly concerned with Native American sentiments about the arch. I mean, we didn't do anything that was obviously disrespectful to us, but I don't know how the Native Americans felt about us just walking up to and under it.
(And, technically, it's a bridge instead of an arch, since it goes across the watercourse.)
And our bodies have at least a couple of obvious senses (vision and hearing) to experience some frequency ranges. And with modern computing power, many natural phenomena on our planet and across the universe can be morphed into ranges we can see or hear.
And this in turn not only aids in scientific understanding, but also allows (some of) us to respond emotionally.
And that keeps me awestruck, even when other properties of our species can be utterly depressing.
https://geohazards.earth.utah.edu/tones/BigArrowhead.html has a distinctly underwater sound to it.
Whoever thought to do this... Kudos to you! (And I... was never here...)
[0] https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/pia17045-voyager-captures-so...
minor nit: Red October had caterpillar drive
Following links at the bottom of the submitted page, there is a tonne of information on how this data was collected. There are animations of the different ways the rocks move due to the vibration.[0] I'm assuming the visuals are exaggerated, but that's just my uneducated on the subject mindset of rocks don't move like that.
The pure science/learning/hold my beer/etc aspect of this is pretty awesome.
Ambient seismic vibration is something of a hidden world around use. With a very sensitive accelerometer you can measure the shaking in a concrete pad due to cars a block a way. Looking in the frequency domain things like when rush hour is and which day is the weekend pop out like a sore thumb.
At one point MI5 could apparently lift crypto keys from the noise of the cipher machine through a wall. Obviously being MI5 this was to spy on the French and not the Russians, but still.
Song of Sand by Suzanne Vega
If sand waves were sound waves
What song would be in the air now
What stinging tune
Could split this endless noon
And make the sky swell with rain
If war were a game that a man or a child
Could think of winning
What kind of rule
Can overthrow a fool
And leave the land with no stain
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzNyao--tuYHere's some very cool visualizations showing exaggerated vibrations of natural wonders:
https://twitter.com/UtahGeohaz/status/1451218202621399043 (Colonnade Arch) https://twitter.com/UtahGeohaz/status/1473692964216057865 (The Matterhorn) https://twitter.com/UtahGeohaz/status/1473692964216057865 (not sure which arch)
https://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/vidmag/
There's sample code on that site, and an online version linked too:
Also, I highly recommend seeing the Arches and other landmarks in Southern Utah if you have the chance. Some of my favorite places on this planet.
https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/various-artists/symp...
https://archive.org/details/VoyagerRecordings-SymphoniesOfTh...
A good example is Dwingeloo radio telescope where they convert pulsar signals into audio in realtime so that you can listen to it using headphones. Another example is playing a sound every time your runtime preforms garbage collection, to gain first-hand intuition for internal operation (like you can pick up any abnormalities in the car engine sound).
NASA, when publishing the Sinister Sounds of the Solar System, called the technique Sonification[1].
Another comment suggests seismic samples like these are taken at 200 Hz. That is comfortably above the rock vibration frequencies of a few Hz. If one simply plays back these samples 100x faster the result would appear as 20 kHz sampling and the signal power that was originally around a few Hz would be heard at a few 100 Hz. The audio sounds a bit higher in frequency so perhaps these numbers are not precisely what were actually used but they give the idea.
That's just the shifting. Accelerometers are used for the original sampling so there must also be some sort of pre-processing in the original sampling domain (the example 200 Hz time base) to convert acceleration information into displacement. This is a 3D displacement so then some other transform must be applied to represent the 3D vibrations with a 1D model.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/arch-rivals-quarrel-over-quirky...
(Not to try and discourage your visit. I'm from Utah and I've often thought of trying to arrange some sort of Python/Data desert or ski outing.)
Since Lake Powell was formed in 1966, it must have only been for a small number of decades in all of history that the bridge was easy to get to.