I read on BBC News that Researchers in Italy have already created a concerto from the underground movements of Mount Etna on Sicily.
Well, judging from the rest of article, this is an out of line way to say that italian scientists (Professor Roberto Barbera of the University of Catania and his team) are trying to get music from seismographs data to reveal inner patterns. The musical method, known as data sonification, adds a further tool to the vulcanologist’s tool box.
Data sonification transforms complex data into audible sounds. It has previously been used to analyse astronomical data from the Shoemaker Levy comet collision with Jupiter. The data sonification software used on Mount Etna was invented by Dr Domenico Vicinanza at the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics. It transforms the inaudible seismic waves that travel through the Earth into music.
According to the image, to create the volcanic score, the team take a seismogram – a graphical record of an earthquake that records the timing and intensity of seismic waves – and trace the peaks and troughs on to blank music bars. They then overlay the contours with musical notes. A digital synthesiser can then play the score.
From a composer point of view, the sistem is simple, but we must remember that the intent is not to make a concert, not even to write music, but only to reveal hidden patterns and produce a sort of “sound signature” of the volcano’s behavior.
I remember that, back in the sixties, american composer Gordon Mumma make the same with the intent to produce music and wrote a sequence of pieces called Mograph starting from seismographs data. From his site, here is an extract from Medium Size Mograph (1963) for 4 hands piano with cybersonic modification (Gordon Mumma e Robert Ashley performers).