About — Meridian / Joshua Borsman

Sound

Meridian treats the geographer's grid as an instrument. 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.

Two voices alternate. Latitude crossings sound as piano: a struck note with a long ringing tail. Longitude crossings sound as cello: a slow bow, vibrato settling in after the attack, sustain in a lower register. Forty to ninety seconds separate one strike from the next; orbital mechanics decide. 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, lit by a single approximate sun. As each string sounds, its parallel or meridian glows as a great circle on the globe and fades over the duration of the note's decay. A small porthole opens on the surface at the station's ground point; inside it, the real precipitation map 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

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 in place of, or alongside, the browser audio output, via a DC-coupled USB audio interface that exposes eight channels of control voltage. Patching is at the installer's discretion; full 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_Precipitation_Rate
Crew manifest: Open Notify
Live video stream: NASA, via YouTube
Typography: EB Garamond, Inter, JetBrains Mono. SIL Open Font License.
Engineering: Three.js, Web Audio API.