Hi Cathryn,

The most important factor in learning is having a location that has several earthquakes within a short period of time, so you can match the sound with the quake. My greatest difficulty lies with my right ear tones, they not only indicate southern quakes, but eastern ones as well, so that's been really tricky. I came to realize that Markleville had what I'd call a higher pitched sound (more electric like) than the area that lies to the south. So its a way to know that in the Sierra where much granite exits that sound belongs over there.

This one for Parkfield as I said sounded to me like hearing lots of underground dirt like noises. No rocky electrical noise, so that seems to me with the length of the tone, that's where it belongs. If I'm wrong, then whereever the quake arrives then I can catalog in my memory bank where the sound belongs and then I'll know more surely the next time.

My left ear for northern sounds is a little easier. The longer the sound, the greater the distance from me. But no matter, I still consider myself a novice at this as there are so many more people who have far better results than I do. Mary/Maya is one of them. She's at least 100% better than I am and if time permitted, I'd love it if she could post here, because then you could get to know how accurate she is.

Sometimes odd things happen before quakes be they intuitive or physical, ie nature, people or animals. Yesterday I was reading the want ads while I was on break and all of the sudden I realized for some odd reason I was reading the lost animals section. I didn't mean to do so, but all of the sudden I was. I got to thinking that if would be nice to know if anyone in Parkfield had noticed any strange animal behavior.

Therefore, having said all of that. It just takes practice and logging the sounds so you can learn the where by the length of the sound, how large by the loudness of the sound, when by practice and sometimes why, be it a regular earthquake, subduction event or some other bit of data. Don has made a log from the e-mails I send him and he also keeps it on disc and he seems to get a bit more out of it than I do. If you want your ear tones logged by Don, just send him e-mails and he'll do it for you to.

I probably missed a thing or two, its still early for me.

Petra