Scientists and musicians have teamed up to uncover what it sounds like.

A computer program coded by Domenico Vicinanza, a particle physicist and composer at Britain’s Anglia Ruskin University, converted those underground tremors into a musical score. The result: an oddly beautiful woodwind track.

Musician Alyssa Schwartz performed the score on flute for a live audience in Atlanta on Tuesday, in what she calls a “sonification” of the raw data collected from a Yellowstone seismograph hours earlier. Using separate data, she performed a preview for The Washington Post.

“By listening to the sound, you can actually have a mental image of what’s happening there,” Vicinanza said in an interview.

The music helps “you perceive the quietness or the agitated, frantic state of the earth in that particular region of Yellowstone,” one of the most seismically active places in the United States.

“You can feel how regular or irregular, how smooth and quiet — or how absolutely dramatic” it sounds, he added. “It’s not like language. It can get immediately to this dedicated part of the brain that is connected to feelings and memories.”

Translating underground oscillations recorded by a seismograph at Yellowstone’s Mary Lake into a musical beat, his technology conveys the data onto a scale familiar to the human ear and constrained within three octaves.

Performing a score generated by computer requires different skills, too.

Moments of musical predictability that a human composer could have written are followed in quick succession by an element no composer would have come up with, flutist Schwartz said.

“Playing music that comes from scientific data is unique, because it doesn’t follow the types of patterns — chords, arpeggios — that musicians are typically trained in,” she said.

But it is also nature’s unpredictability that enables the music to surprise the listener pleasantly.

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In the musical sample performed for The Post by Schwartz on the flute Tuesday, derived from Yellowstone data recorded earlier in the day, the score appears mostly in the G major key. “And then there’s this really beautiful moment, about halfway through the clip, that implies D minor. And it moves to this minor tonality,” Schwartz explained. The tonal shift can be heard at approximately 1:08 in the clip.

“There are moments of things that sound human, that sound familiar,” she said. “The data didn’t have that in mind.”

One problem for those performing Earth scores is finding a moment for an intake of breath. The raw data leaves no room for natural pauses or space to set the performer up for a tricky section. “A lot of the music is written in a way that you can detect the missing human,” Schwartz said.

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The input data is collected from a seismograph station at Mary Lake, in the park’s center, which Vicinanza selected from among Yellowstone’s network of dozens of seismographs for the varied nature of its tremors.

“The tremor of the earth is essentially something that has a very structural nature. So what I’m doing is trying to extract and highlight and filter the regular part of the structure, and use them in this case to make music,” he said of the “sonification” process.

The program then maps the Earth’s oscillations onto a musical score by translating ground motion data, traditionally represented by the position of a needle on a seismograph, into a pitch. The more dramatically the needle oscillates, the more dramatically the rendered pitch will jump up and down.

“What you hear is a melody that has a very familiar structure because it uses the notes of a scale that we consider familiar, that we are comfortable with,” he said. “What I’m doing is essentially tracing the seismogram on a piece of music.”

The music builds upon previous work by Vicinanza, who has pioneered software’s use in turning scientific data into musical sound — a practice that has become increasingly popular in recent years. Listening to data points, rather than looking at visual representations of them, can help scientists interpret complex data, as our ears can be more sensitive to patterns than our eyes.

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In March, Vicinanza translated the waveform data of interstellar space into a separate flute melody. The score represents the moment NASA’s Voyager 1 left the bubble around the sun and entered interstellar space, billions of miles away from Earth — gradually increasing in loudness as the spacecraft crosses the threshold.

Each note represents one day of average readings of plasma waves, caused by the oscillation of charged particles in space. Toward the end, as Voyager 1 struggled to beam data a greater distance back to Earth, the notes become more sparse.

Kasha Patel contributed to this report.