Seismic facies analysis through musical attributes

ABSTRACT Seismic facies analysis is a well‐established technique in the workflow followed by seismic interpreters. Typically, huge volumes of seismic data are scanned to derive maps of interesting features and find particular patterns, correlating them with the subsurface lithology and the lateral changes in the reservoir. In this paper, we show how seismic facies analysis can be accomplished in an effective and complementary way to the usual one. Our idea is to translate the seismic data in the musical domain through a process called sonification , mainly based on a very accurate time–frequency analysis of the original seismic signals. From these sonified seismic data, we extract several original musical attributes for seismic facies analysis, and we show that they can capture and explain underlying stratigraphic and structural features. Moreover, we introduce a complete workflow for seismic facies analysis starting exclusively from musical attributes, based on state‐of‐the‐art machine learning computational techniques applied to the classification of the aforementioned musical attributes. We apply this workflow to two case studies: a sub‐salt two‐dimensional seismic section and a three‐dimensional seismic cube. Seismic facies analysis through musical attributes proves to be very useful in enhancing the interpretation of complicated structural features and in anticipating the presence of hydrocarbon‐bearing layers.