The planet is the instrument. Every note is a real event: an earthquake, a solar flare, the sun rising over Lagos, the space station crossing a coastline. Every filter sweep is the actual solar wind, the surf is real ocean swell, the drone bends with real tides. Hear it, play it, or take the raw data into your DAW.
For DJs and producers who want the planet, not our synths. The last 24 hours as MIDI notes + CC automation lanes (one track per measurement), plus CSV and JSON tables, timed to your tempo. Drag it into Ableton, Logic, FL or Bitwig and drive your own instruments.
Starts when you press it, stops when you press again.
Everything that played since you hit PLAY.
A session freezes the exact data so it replays identically, anywhere.
Free to use, commercial included. Credit required.
Tap a layer to mute it, hold to solo.
| Step | AI? | What actually happens |
|---|---|---|
| Measuring | No | Seismometers, satellites at L1 and GOES, tide gauges, ocean and weather models, NASA event tracking. |
| Choosing notes | No | Fixed formulas, written on each card. Same reading, same note, every time. |
| Making the sound | No | Oscillators, filters, noise and convolution reverb, built live in your browser. No samples. |
| Rhythm (Pulse) | No | Tempo from solar wind speed, hats from the quake rate, ghost snares from Kp, fills from big quakes. |
| Exports | No | WAV, stems, MIDI and data files are written byte by byte by this page's code. |
| Writing the code | Yes | Claude helped write it, as a coding tool. That's the whole extent of it. |
Replay compresses the last 24 hours, keeping every event in its real order and spacing. The clock shows the real UTC time being played. Live mode plays new quakes within about a minute of USGS publishing them. Solar wind is measured at L1, 30–60 minutes before it reaches Earth. The ISS position is propagated from its published orbital elements and checked against a live fix (the gap is shown on its card). Sunrise times are computed. If any source fails, the status bar says demo for that feed and nothing is passed off as live.
Use anything you record or export from Earth MIDI, including audio, stems, MIDI and data, in released, commercial or live work, free of charge. The one condition is a credit wherever you credit samples or collaborators (liner notes, streaming credits, video descriptions):
Planetary data sonified with Earth MIDI by Colin Robinson · earthmidi.comEvery export carries this credit: WAV metadata, MIDI copyright and text events, CSV and JSON headers, README and CREDIT files in each zip, and burned into video clips. Underlying data: USGS, NOAA and NASA (public domain) and Open-Meteo (CC BY 4.0, attribution included in every file).