An homage to the iconic Joy Division album cover inspired by soundscape research during my postdoc in the Willenbring Lab.
I love visual representations of audio signals. Most sounds are much easier to see than they are to hear, plus by turning acoustic signals into images we can bypass human auditory limits. Waterfall plots are a nice option because they look like elevation maps and the idea of a sonic terrain was very appropriate for this project. The goal of our study was to use acoustic monitoring to detect the presence of non-native earthworms in northern Sweden, a region mostly covered in permafrost. Earthworm range expansion into this region is a major concern because they can accelerate release of soil organic carbon, which is very concentrated in northern latitudes. After collecting many hours of underground recordings, we found that earthworms alter underground soundscapes, probably owing to their complete restructuring of soil pore networks.
This plot was made from 5 seconds of 32 kHz wav audio recorded on an Audiomoth buried several inches below the surface at the Abisko Scientific Research Station, which is north of the Arctic circle and truly one of the most beautiful places I’ve seen. I used a 8096-point FFT with frame length of 8000 points and a 92% overlap; this outputs a grid representing the power at each 4 Hz bin for every ~0.25 s time step. The waterfall plot turns the time series values for each frequency bin into a horizontal line, where the height corresponds to the amount of power at that frequency at a given time. I trimmed the frequency range to 200 - 560 Hz to increase the row spacing and create an aesthetic more similar to the original Unknown Pleasures cover.
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