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Listen to the Sky
disposable60 writes "Sky Ear will be a one-night event in which a glowing "cloud" of mobile phones and helium balloons is released into the air so that people can dial into the cloud and listen to the sounds of the sky."
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Even better, muck around with VLF/ELF radio. You can hear much more interesting stuff than just the sky, like whistlers from thunderstorms for starters...
Check out vlf.it for some interesting stuff on VLF/ELF radio.
And why wait?? Listen now, live. (not all at once now!!) If that site goes down, and I presume it will within seconds of posting this, this site has pre-recorded sounds of Earth's natural EM radiation.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
I have been on the top of a pretty high mountain (Bald Mt, Butte County, CA) during Field Day 2003. The cell had full strength signals but we couldn't make a call. When my friend got his roaming bill it turns out he was hitting a tower about 150 miles away. The better gain antennas on the cell tower could hit us, but out little .3w phone couldn't get back to it.
I know that we could use a midget, but if you're going to send up a midget, you may as well just send a weather balloon with a microphone. You never think your midget friends are useful until you actually need them :)
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Speaking of RF, they don't make clear *how* users are expected to hear these VLF phenomena, considering the GSM handsets popular in the UK are 1. digital (any interesting 'noise' becomes a bit error likely to be discarded from the stream), and 2. UHF/'microwave.'
There's something absurdist and poetic about 'calling the sky,' but I do hope that a) there'll be a VLF radio onboard patched into said phones (erm, and the phones' own RF will indeed play hob with it, to the point it'd be unlikely to hear natural phenomena over the noise), and b) they'll webcast the audio so more than just a select few can 'participate.' (Art can be about exclusivity, but in this case, it adds little to what seems intended as a populist piece.)
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They've got a lot of pretty sketches and prototypes as apply to hanging the balloons, but no detail on the wireless end at all.
Arrgh.. My imagination ran aground... What's the point of this then, there isn't anything interesting in this stunt. On the other hand, all Britain were quite interested with a guy locked in a glass box suspended off meters the ground... I think we are experiencing sensory deprevation, at least in the interesting stuff department. :)
You're probably referring to the Schumann resonance, the resonance of the earth-ionosphere resonant cavity. Energy from lightning around the world excites this resonance, which then rings--much as hitting a bell with a hammer causes the bell to ring.
Also like an acoustic bell, there is a fundamental frequency of resonance and many overtones that grow fainter as you go up in frequency. The fundamental Schumann resonance is approximately 7.8 Hz; the first few overtones are usually given as 13.8, 19.7, 25.7, and 31.7 Hz. There is a slight variation in the frequencies involved over long periods of time, as the ionosphere changes in response to solar activity.
...because if they are, the GSM circuitry will detect zero noise and therefore send zero signal to the receiving handset. The receiving handset will auto-generate a random noise which is perceived by our ears as silence.
Thus, if you phone up these balloons, the sound you hear has been generated by the phone you are holding next to your ear!
That's a really low frequency. Is it a concidence that it's wavelength is the almost the same as the circumference of the Earth? Or is that the whole reason it works?
Thanks for the information and links!
According to http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects, such a net of cell phones will create an impact of 1.16E9 megatons of TNT and create a crater 108 miles in diameter. It also notes that simliar sized nets of cell phones hit the earth about once every billion years.