Wind
speed data sonifications of Hurricane Bob
The following
stereo MP3 sonifications are created using wind data in three locations
during the tropical cyclone Hurricane Bob from 1991. The design of the
sonification system focused on the creation of a sound character that
is like the sound of the wind whistling but that presents information
from an entire day's activity in a short period of time (the examples
here are about one minute each). To create the effect of wind in the sonification
application, an initial noise signal (pink noise) is filtered according
to the wind speed data. The left channel of each sound file presents a
sonification of the East-West winds, and the right channel presents a
sonification of the North-South winds for each particular geographic location
and elevation.
Click here to see a sketch of a visualization and sonification interface
(flash required)
|
Sample
1: |
Sample
2: |
Sample
3: |
The wind speed values from the two directions each create a filter bank, determining the shape of three filters: a frequency filter (inverted, so if the wind speeds are higher the filter passes more high frequencies), a resonance filter, and an amplitude filter.
Here are
two illustrations of the filter banks at two different points in time
for two different data streams:
1. The filtering is somewhat smooth in
the data set for the top of the atmosphere at the northernmost point.
2. There is much more variation in the filtering of the data from the center of the storm at 35,000 feet.
