Pulse of an Ocean: Sonification of Ocean Buoy Data

The author presents his work in sonifying ocean buoy data for scientific, pedagogical and compositional purposes. Mapping the spectral buoy data to audible frequencies creates interesting and illuminating sonifications of ocean wave dynamics. Several phenomena can be heard, including both those visible and those invisible in graphical representations of the data. The author has worked extensively with this data to compose music and to produce Music from the Ocean, a multimedia CD-ROM demonstrating the data, the phenomena and the sonification. After a brief introduction to physical oceanography, many examples are presented and a composition and installation created from the sonifications are discussed.