Sonification of Earth's Rotation (Audio Universe: Tour of the Solar System)

This is a sonification to represent the sunlight bouncing off the spinning Earth as it spins. The sound changes timbre as the Sun passes over water (a “brighter” sound) or land (a “darker” sound). For this, we used data of the covering fraction of water as a function of longitude from the GEBCO 2021 bathymetry*.

The sonification was produced using the code 'STRAUSS' (Trayford & Harrison, 28th Proceedings of the International Community of Auditory Displays (ICAD2023), p249-256, 2023), which is available on github: https://github.com/james-trayford/strauss
This was created for the show Audio Universe: Tour of the Solar System. A show about the Solar System that aims to be accessible to audiences irrespective of their level of vision. A description of how it was produced is presented in Harrison et al. 2022, Astronomy & Geophysics, Volume 63, Issue 2, Pages 2.38-2.40.

Project website: www.audiouniverse.org.

Credit: J. Trayford (Earth visuals from Google Earth).

* Data obtained from GEBCO Compilation Group, 2021, “GEBCO 2021 Grid”, (doi:10.5285/c6612cbe-50b3-0cff-e053-6c86abc09f8f).