It turns out the earth really is flat, after all.

As methods of presenting data go, there are few that are as interesting as this. Art collective Art of Failure came up with the project “Flat Earth Society” in 2011 as a way of mapping the topography of the earth onto the grooves of a vinyl disc, and if that isn’t a great way of displaying what would usually be a bunch of number, we don’t know what is.

The data was funneled into notorious computer music programming language Pure Data (or PD), which interpreted the earth’s natural grooves (mountains, hills and valleys) into wave forms. The wave forms were then cut to laquer discs, which made two sides of audio – one for the Northern Hemisphere and one for the Southern Hemisphere, and “Flat Earth Society” was done.

Weirdly, looking at the record you can actually see the flattened world map pretty easily, but hearing it certainly makes the concept far harder to decipher. It’s probably obvious but the actual sound itself is something like a Mille Plateaux record from the late 90s or early 00s, sounding like slowly shifting glitchy rhythms and maybe not giving much away about the source material itself.

The collective filmed themselves playing the two records simultaneously, which we assume is a way of hearing the earth all at once, and to be honest, we actually quite like it. [via The Wire / The Vinyl Factory]