My father gets some sort of daily science news e-mail, which he occasionally forwards to me. One recent one described the recordings by a John T. Bullitt of the sounds of the earth. He has to speed them up and raise them many many octaves, but you hear pops and gurgles and whirs and clicks from various seismic phenomena - and the dull roar of surf pounding the coasts of every continent in the background. Occasionally 
there is a loud echoing crash or boom from a larger quake. (To be honest it sounds the way my stomach does sometimes when it's vocalizing, so it seems like being in the belly of the earth.) My father sent the article to me because it sounded like my kind of thing to him (he's right) and also perhaps because Bullitt is a Buddhist, and finds these recordings meditative. In any case, within not very minutes of receiving my father's e-mail, I had ordered Bullitt's recording online. It arrived today and is quite fascinating.The sounds are in stereo but really three-dimensional; they are positioned in different places deep within the earth. At the top of this post is the "score" of the second of the three tracks, with sounds recorded at Kodiak Island, Alaska; Piñon Flat, California; Obninsk, Russia; and Talaya, also in Russia, which together give you the sound you might hear if you were "1000 miles directly below the North Pole facing the eastern coast of Australia." It takes about 20 minutes to cover 140 days in mid-2006; the time is accelerated 10,000 times and the sounds are transposed upwards 13 octaves!
Quite different the explosive sounds from the time of the great tsunami, 3 days starting December 26, 2004 and accelerated only 245 times, the sounds shifted up by about 8 octaves. Here's Bullitt's "score":
Troubling to listen to, but I can see how it might aid one's meditation, becoming aware of the vast cosmos of which human suffering is just a part, and yet not insignificant but true to the depths of cosmic experience.
