Earthquakes Are Music to One Man's Ears
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Earthquakes can be jolting, deadly and frightening, but what about musical? Sounds farfetched? Well, maybe not. Here's CNN's Rusty Dornin.</s>RUSTY DORNIN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): What we hear during an earthquake are usually the consequences. But the actual shake, rattle and roll of this 1992 California tremor was music to the ears of seismologist Andrew Michael.</s>ANDREW MICHAEL, SEISMOLOGIST: So we just take basically our seismograms, turn them into a compact disk and then play them out through the loud speakers where we then make the motion go much faster so that we can actually hear it and it gets up into the pitches that our ears can deal with.</s>DORNIN: A musician, Michael used the quake's frequencies to compose The Earthquake Quartet -- tremors from a trombone, vocals, cello and notes from the hard rock of the California quake. Michael uses the piece when he lectures.</s>MICHAEL: When we're doing these sort of smeared notes it's trying to symbolize the strain building up in the earth and it's repeatedly interrupted by earthquakes and the earthquakes give off energy from that strain.</s>DORNIN: A researcher for the U.S. Geological Survey, Michael says there are tens of earthquakes daily in California alone. He hopes the notes here will make the impact of these notes much clearer.</s>MICHAEL: There are people who are going around sort of as the happy culture not listening to those earthquakes in the background and maybe they're interested in music and we might be able to sort of hook their interest with a piece of music and then get them to think a little about earthquake preparedness.</s>DORNIN: Awareness of the possibilities through earthshaking rhythms. Rusty Dornin, CNN, San Francisco.