Until recently, seismometers recorded only up-down motion, and the standard display was the seismogram, a wiggly line drawn with a pen plotting on a scrolling sheet of paper. Animated visual techniques are now being used for the analysis of seismic motion generated by earthquakes in Southern California. It is displayed as either vector displacement, particle motion traces, or surface displacement of the entire array. Updating the screen image for each digital sample produces an animated display analogous to a movie of an earthquake.
Work is currently underway to sonify the frequency domain animation.
Nov 1990 Presentations talk Visualization Techniques for Seismic Array Data , presented with animations by Paul Anderson at Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratories, Richland, Washington, Feb 1992.