Synthesis of earthquake-like sound using seismic ground-motion records

Listening to a sound representing ground motion is valuable to intuitively understand an earthquake, compared with conventional methods such as observing waveforms, Fourier spectra, and response spectra. In this study, we propose a new method for generating sound representing an earthquake, which has several differences in comparison with existing methods. In our new method, an earthquake-like sound is generated by modifying the frequency information of a generating function based on the symmetric Fourier analysis theory. Applying the method to existing seismograms illustrates three features of the sound generated by this method: the sound has the same duration as the seismogram, the sound pitch corresponds to the instantaneous frequency of the seismogram, and the sound volume corresponds to the envelope amplitude of the seismogram. Furthermore, we constructed a web-based earthquake-like sound generating system called Naion. Other applications will be implemented in the future.