- journal_title：The Leading Edge
- Contributor：Paolo Dell'Aversana
- Publisher：Society of Exploration Geophysicists
- Date：2013-08-01
- Format：text/html
- Language：en
- Identifier：10.1190/tle32080980.1
- journal_abbrev：The Leading Edge
- issn：1070-485X
- volume：32
- issue：8
- firstpage：980
- section：Acquisition/Processing
Sensitivity for music is a diffuse property of the human brain. When we listen to music, the entire brain is active. In particular, the auditory cortex has connections to the frontal lobe of the brain where many of our capabilities for abstraction and inference are located. A widely accepted idea (although it is unproven) is that humans have an inborn capacity to process music. David Huron highlighted the adaptive advantage of having a mind able to recognize sound patterns and to extract complex significances from a heterogeneous flux of sounds arriving from the environment (Huron, 1991). Probably our ability to recognize complex sound patterns is one of the results of natural evolution of humans' cognitive capabilities (Ball, 2010). These concepts suggest the following idea: we could use complex sounds (and music in particular), and not only images, for geophysical data analysis, interpretation, and integration. An advantage to this could derive from the fact that sounds have many physical, perceptive, psychological, and cultural “dimensions”: this implies an expanded range of possibilities for analyzing and interpreting geophysical signals transformed into sounds. […] Human sensitivity for music (and for sounds in general) is nowadays supported by advanced technology and by many formats and informatics' protocols used in digital music (such as wav, mp3, MIDI). These allow easy sound manipulation, analysis, and integration. In particular, the MIDI protocol links heterogeneous information through multiple types of media. There is an additional reason why geophysical data analysis/interpretation could be performed in the domain of sounds and music: the nature of several types of geophysical signals, like seismic data, is closer to the physics of sounds than to the physics of images. These ideas have been investigated (partially) by other authors (Benioff, 1953; Speeth, 1961; Hayward, 1994; Kilb et al., 2012; Peng et al., 2012). In this article, I expand them by proposing a new approach based on exploring new interesting connections between geosciences and the most recent technological innovations in the domain of digital music.