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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)"
Now we'll get sued by the Alien RIAA.
no one can hear your 10-movement musical composition
I played one of the wavs backwards, and I could distinctly hear the words "European Space Agency engineers are weenies".
we'll finally find out where celine dion really came from, won't we? and as usual, canada would be really sorry about all the inconvenience they caused. mmhmm...
kthxbye~!
insert something about holst.
Riley listened carefully to some crackling and squealing patterns from the magnetic field the Galileo spacecraft discovered surrounding Jupiter's largest moon, Ganymede. "It sounded to me like a voice saying, 'beebopterismo,' so that's the starting point for one of the movements," he said.
I think someone's been reading a little too much of the Ringworld series.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Was it just me, or did the recording of the spacecraft's exodus from Ganymede's magnetic pole sound a lot like those underwater whale recordings?
At the beginning, I think that was Qo'noS exploding or something. Spilled tea all over my tunic.
thats just
/dev/urandom > /dev/dsp
cat
...with stories from space like this, is that they could as well let you download a sample made of the scientist's toilet experience, and no-one would notice any difference. Anyway, listening to this is very fancy....because... you know... it's from space - it must be awesome!
Well it beats the silent "music".
But not by much.
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))
Han-Wen Nienhuys -- LilyPond
Riley listened carefully to some crackling and squealing patterns from the magnetic field the Galileo spacecraft discovered surrounding Jupiter's largest moon, Ganymede. "It sounded to me like a voice saying, 'beebopterismo,' [...]
This guy should come over to the playground in my neighbourhood, he'll be able to record a lot of music! Beebopterismo's, hiphopterismo's, as much as he likes, and not to forget... the swing!!
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.
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
.. Lance made it into space, we could have had a quartet.
Sample the sounds from Galileo, Voyager and Cassini and now featuring Lance Bass!
Live web cams
Dr. Fiorella Terenzi, radio astronomer and musician, has already done this sort of thing. (Plus, as her collaboration with Thomas Dolby ("Quantum Mechanic") proves, she also has a great singing voice. :)
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
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!
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
Slashdot posted an earlier story on this in July. Its amusing what some people can use for inspiration.
And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.
Berke Breathed
It's not interesting, at least to me. Every time NASA gets an oscillating signal of some sort, they convert it to sound waves and play it, hoping that the press mistakes it for something profound. They're seldom disappointed.
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.
....by Tomita. He sampled radio waves from a number of stars and used those as the base waveforms for some Moog synthesizer compositions.
--
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NASA had a huge brain drain in the early 1970s, when Apollo wound down, and never recovered. It's sad.
It's actually whale songs coming from an alien probe. We've got to send Captain Kirk back in time to get 2 humpback whales to reply. Oh wait they're not extinct yet.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
NASA spends about 1-2% of it's budget in an effort to communicate its activities to the general public or students. This is considered money well-spent, since it is the public that has paid for exploration of space.
Just as we cannot see outside the visible spectrum, we cannot hear plasma sound waves, which are mainly detected by electromagnetic antennae. But these sounds are just as informative about what is going on in our solar system as the Gamma, Xray or UV images that are brought back from space.
For example, there is a steady rumble from the roiling solar atmosphere, which expands supersonically throughout the solar system. And when a spacecraft crosses a shock wave (upstream of all the planets), there is a huge sonic boom. Lightening and auroras produce a wide variety of sounds.
So try to think of these sounds as having been recorded in the GREAT outdoors, and ask yourself what you might be hearing. One person's noise is another person's signal!
ThosEM
http://www.spacesounds.com/
"Basic science has always worked on the fact that we don't know the answer, hence we ask the question without having the answer."
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Even if discoveries like sounds in space are never applied, it gets the public interested in science. It might even inspire young minds to accomplish great works someday. Such was the case of a simple beeping noise in 1957 from Sputnik.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit200210
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20