NASA Music Out of This World

Koyaanisqatsi writes "With detection instruments on NASA's Voyagers, Galileo, Cassini and other spacecraft, University of Iowa physicist Dr. Don Gurnett recorded waves that course through outer space. Gurnett converted the plasma waves into sounds which inspired a 10-movement musical composition called "Sun Rings." Sample the sounds from Galileo, Voyager and Cassini. (Full Story)"

Comments

astronomical percussion music

[hanwen]

Reminds me of a piece by Circus S, called Pulsar. It's a piece for 6 percussion players inspired by the sounds made by pulsar signals.

See the circus S site.

(Oh, actually, the composer is called
Gérard Grisey and the piece Le Noir de l'Etoile (1989/90))

A CD has been out for years.

[taliver]

I have a CD of the NASA voyager probe recordings. Sounds interesting at first, and then gets boring. The CD is 50 minutes long or so, and has a warning about the dangers of using heavy machinery while listening, since it puts people to sleep.

Anyway, some sounds like whales, other parts sound like choirs from the movie 2001.

Ham Radio

[Servo]

As a kid, I used to take a ham radio (I forget what wavelengh, its been a while) and tune it to odd frequencies that produced weird rythmic pulses. It was probably just interference from nearby electronics, but it was fun to listen to.

Those sound bites remind me of what I used to listen to as a kid. Music to my ears!

Kronos Quartet

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I'd just like to say as a physics major at the University of Iowa and part of the Society of Physics Students that we are going to the performance tonight where the music is being played. It's called the Kronos Quartet and there wil be a meeting with the sound engineer of Hancher Auditorium before the show for all ticket holders in the Green Room.

This was down thirty years ago...

[FFFish]

....by Tomita. He sampled radio waves from a number of stars and used those as the base waveforms for some Moog synthesizer compositions.