Sounding

Sounding is a continuous, real-time sonification of ocean conditions along the Pacific Northwest coast.

Live measurements from six gauging stations between Charleston, Oregon and Neah Bay, Washington are translated into a layered field of drones, slow harmonic motion, and resonant plucks. The piece is designed to play without repetition for hours at a time. Nothing is sequenced in advance. What you hear at any given moment is shaped by what the ocean is doing at that moment, six minutes ago, at the gauge house nearest the listener.

The work was conceived for the gallery: low-frequency information carried by large speakers, a long reverberant tail, and a slow cadence of attacks that rewards extended attention. It is also intended to function at home, on headphones, as a stable accompaniment to other work.

Observations are drawn from two public services run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: the CO-OPS Tides & Currents API and the National Weather Service API. Each station contributes water level, water temperature, wind speed and direction, and barometric pressure. Wave height is fetched separately from the nearest National Data Buoy Center buoy when one is available.

• Neah Bay, WA9443090
• Port Angeles, WA9444090
• Seattle, WA9447130
• Toke Point, WA9440910
• Astoria, OR9439040
• Charleston, OR9432780

Polls occur at six-minute intervals, matching the cadence at which CO-OPS publishes new water-level data. Between polls, the live state is smoothly interpolated so the sonic field never freezes; the semi-diurnal tidal phase continues to advance on its own clock. When a service is unreachable the piece does not fall silent: it carries forward from the last known state and decays slowly back toward climatological norms.

Each observation is bound to a specific musical parameter. The mapping is fixed and deterministic, so that a particular weather pattern always produces the same sonic shape. Repeated listening teaches the ear to read the ocean by ear alone.

• Tide level & phasechord, register
• Wave heightpluck density, reverb send
• Wind speedfilter brightness
• Wind directionrandom gating
• Air pressureoverall amplitude
• Water temperaturedrone detune, damping

The pitch material is fixed to a Lydian mode whose root sits at A1, fifty-five hertz. Drone voices are arranged at the root, fifth, octave, and twelfth. Plucks are quantized to the same scale; their register rises and falls with the tide.

Sounding is built to run on two audio paths from the same mapping. The first is a web engine that produces sound entirely in the browser using the Web Audio API: four detuned drone voices, a Karplus-Strong pluck voice, and a pair of slow harmonic voices, all summed into a procedural convolution reverb with an eleven-second tail. The second is a control-voltage path that drives an analog modular synthesizer assembled around Mutable Instruments Rings and Clouds, Make Noise Morphagene, Vermona Melodicer, ALM Boss Bow Two, and Qubit Nautilus. The eight channels of an Expert Sleepers ES-8 carry pitch, a pluck gate, four slow control voltages tied to the live ocean state, a divided tidal clock, and an occasional random gate.

The web path is the default. The modular path is reserved for the gallery installation.

Joshua Borsman is a Seattle-based artist working in sound, kinetic sculpture, and generative systems. Recent work includes Lightcurve (2024–), a real-time sonification of variable-star photometry, and a live installation marking the bloom of a corpse flower at the Amazon Spheres (2025). His practice spans gallery, public, and digital environments. He maintains Ground Floor Studio, a fabrication space in South Lake Union.

joshuaborsman.com

Set in Cormorant Garamond and IBM Plex Mono. Synthesis via the Web Audio API. Control voltages via the Expert Sleepers ES-8. Data drawn from the NOAA CO-OPS Tides & Currents service, the National Weather Service, and the National Data Buoy Center.

Sounding is a work of authorship. The code, audio synthesis, visual artwork, and accompanying text are © 2026 Joshua Borsman, all rights reserved. The NOAA data referenced by the work is in the public domain and is reproduced under that licensing.