Meridian — Joshua Borsman

Sound

As the International Space Station moves overhead — every ninety-two minutes, sixteen times a day — the point directly beneath it crosses the parallels of latitude and the meridians of longitude. Those lines are the strings, and the station's track is the hand that plays them.

Latitude crossings sound as piano: a struck note with a long ringing tail. Longitude crossings sound as cello: a slow bow, vibrato after the attack, sustain in a lower register. A third voice runs underneath, an atmospheric layer keyed to the live weather at the sub-satellite point. The pitches sit in a pentatonic mode whose tonic transposes through the circle of fourths every three and a half hours. There is no fixed score — the orbit writes the piece as it goes.

Image

A 3D Earth in WebGL. As each string sounds, its parallel or meridian glows on the globe and fades over the note's decay. A small porthole opens at the station's ground point; inside, the real precipitation pattern for that patch of Earth right now, sampled from NASA's IMERG global rain product. The porthole's outer ring traces wind speed; its background tint follows temperature.

Specification

Title: Meridian
Year: 2026
Medium: Real-time generative sound installation
Duration: Continuous; never repeating
Tuning: A minor pentatonic, tonic shifting every 3.5 h
Source: Live orbital telemetry, live weather, NASA GIBS IMERG
Edition: Open

Live

Sub-satellite

— ° · — °

Altitude

— km

Velocity

— km/h

Footprint

— km

Visibility

—

Updated

— ago

Crew aboard

—

Establishing manifest…

Onboard

The view from the station's external cameras, broadcast by NASA. Subject to Loss-of-Signal as the ISS passes out of range of ground stations.

Series

Meridian joins an ongoing series of real-time sonifications that includes Ephemeris (low Earth orbit), Sounding (Pacific Northwest tides), Helioscope (the Sun), Lightcurve (James Webb imagery), Convergence (BGP routing), and Phase Space (strange attractors).

Modular mode

In exhibition, Meridian can be configured to drive a Eurorack modular synthesizer alongside the browser audio, via a DC-coupled USB audio interface that exposes eight channels of control voltage. Patching is at the installer's discretion; technical documentation is available on request.

Artist

Joshua Borsman is an artist working in sound, kinetic sculpture, and generative systems. His pieces have been staged in galleries, gardens, sidewalks, and orbit.

Colophon

Earth imagery: NASA Blue Marble, public domain.
Orbital telemetry: wheretheiss.at
Weather data: Open-Meteo
Precipitation map: NASA GIBS · IMERG
Crew manifest: Open Notify
Live video: NASA, via YouTube
Typography: EB Garamond, Inter, JetBrains Mono
Engineering: Three.js, Web Audio API