Slashdot Mirror
Eerie Sounds from Saturn
Mick Ohrberg writes "Scientists at NASA have now heard proof (called 'Saturn kilometric radiation') that Saturn has a phenomenon similar to the earths' Northern Lights (aurora borealis). Talking about the eerie sounding noise, Dr. Bill Kurth with the University of Iowa, says "We believe that the changing frequencies are related to tiny radio sources moving up and down along Saturn's magnetic field lines."
It couldn't sound any spookier if they added a Theremin."
Just because the Saturnites are watching the twilight zone gives our scientists no reason to talk about electroical-magnetical-thingicals...
Go to the w3.org and put Slashdot.org through the validator.
I thought there was no sound in space?
This is why I like technology. My seven-year-old will think this is just very, very cool. Perhaps one day we'll actually find little green men. If mean heck...if we can hear this, just think of how much more is to come! AWESOME!
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
Did a project in college to detect and characterize some of these "noises", but in the Earth's atmosphere. They're really very interesting.
u nds.htmlrel=url2html-7959http://image.gsfc.nasa.go v/poetry/sounds/sounds.html>
The "dawn chorus" (not recorded by me!) can be found here: ahref=http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/sounds/so
Now let's hear an updated version of "Music of the Spheres"!
Sounds like some of the effects from the soundtrack to Forbidden Planet!
http://imdb.com/title/tt0049223/
Is this eerie recording week in science news? First the recording of the tsunami of the Earth Ripping Apart and now this.
"Scientists don't change their minds, they just die." -- Max Planck
I don't know about you guys, but I'm feeling more and more the need of killing someone as I listen to these beatiful sounds!
And here I was going to trade in my Hyundai for a Saturn because it was making erie noises as well.
FLR
If NASA gets slashdotted, be sure to bookmark the link and check back later. The sound is REALLY cool! It sounds just like the sound effects from those sci fi B movies from the 50's!
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
The planet of Saturn has ripped off Man or Astroman.
Theremin the size of a planet, and all I get is a Slashdotting.
>>Time on this recording has been compressed, so that 73 seconds corresponds to 27 minutes. Since the frequencies of these emissions are well above the audio frequency range, we have shifted them downward by a factor of 44.
If you compressed the time of my voice down about 22 times and shifted its frequency down by a factor of 44, I think I would sound eerie as well!
Then again... you might not need to shift my voice to make it sound eerie...
NeoThermic
Use my link above, or to view my server, NeoThermic.com
I hear dead planets!
If anyone's interested in listening to the Earth natural radio broadcasts, NASA has a nice page set up (with kits for making your own VLF receiver)here. Other planets here.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
I expect I'll be hearing this in every new electronica song from now until Judgement Day.
Saturnalia by Grant Callin
McGreevy ground-based VLF recordings
This is news? Hippies have been hearing this sound since the 60s!
So THAT'S what has been keeping me awake at night. I'm calling NASA tomorrow and demanding that they turn that thing down.
I've heard some eerie sounds come out of uranus too
here's the link, working this time: Clicky
[begin singing]
The solar system is alive!!... with the sounds of saturn.....
[end singing]
...oh wait, never mind.
come from Uranus.
Quote: "Most Impressive"
I hear that Darth Vader desperatly wants to replace his Crazy Frog ringtone with this sound. Apparently he didn't have to think too long about it. After all, It's far more suitable for a Dark Lord.
I'm sure Jamster will find a way to ruin it though with Axel F over the top or something...
"Who says nothing is impossible? Some people do it every day!" - Alfred E. Neuman
You can still buy new ones from Moog.
I somehow get the feeling that some scientist were sitting around the lab drinking cheap beer, and wondered what they'd have to do to get the Saturn data to sound EXACTLY like something out of a poor-quality 50's space flick.
I'm sure the guys/gals over at obsolete.com really appreciate somebody posting a link on /. that isn't even an integral part of the main story. Now their servers "couldn't sound any spookier if they added a Theremin".
Well, I know what I'm playing out my darkened windows to Trick-or-Treaters come Halloween!
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
this sound exactly like the intro to the 90's remake of night of the living dead, which in my humble opinion is the best zombie flick of all time.
Here is another, perhaps even stranger sounding recording from the Iowa scientists' web site.
i ni/SKR2/casskrtrig04207a.wav
http://cassini.physics.uiowa.edu/space-audio/cass
Ive made a mirror for when nasa goes slash dotted. Only wav file is mirrored http://www.ihud.com/file.php?file=1122343563/12316 3main_cas-skr1-112203.wav
Heh. Just kidding. They've been here for years already.
qntm.org
In case you didn't know, Hell is beneath our feet, and you can listen to a real audio sample of it here.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
And I told them not to touch the black monolith, but they ahead sending a craft to Saturn. Talking about advancing to the next stage of human evolution.
The summary makes it sound like this is something new. It isn't. SKR has been known for decades. The aurora have been directly imaged in the UV. What's new is cool audio files (nothing wrong with that) from a very good instrument in Saturn orbit, an instrument that should lead to a better understanding of aurora and magnetospheric processes.
Sounds like a good Doctor Who type sound effect.
from the woooooooooo-woooooooooooo dept.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubb_Rubb/
Yous asposed to be awake on sataun' when the aurora comes.
There is truth in humor.
Now I'll have to sleep with the nightlight on.
I didnt know Brian Eno was playing Saturn these days...
damn he must have a good booking agent.
I'm playing it over and over.
It's bringing back some great memories of watching bad 50's sci-fi movies as a kid.
For some reason I keep picturing a fat gorilla-suited space alien in a diving helmet....
Oh no... I've played it too many times... I've alerted the terrible space aliens that have been monitoring our airwaves!
Everybody run! Save your selves! Save your wives!
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Sounds like the theme music from "Lost In Space" caught in a Saturnian feedback loop. So much for "Silent Running".
The Fithp are coming
...or can anyone else see a face in the spectrum image?
Not saying "it's jesus!!!", but to me it seems to be looking left (its right) with its mouth open at the bottom around 6:40.
Kinda freaky to me (besides the audio).
eerie sounds from Uranus jokes.
As someone who's had a minor career in computer music, I've seen this type of thing again and again. You can take almost any sampled data and if it is something other than purely random you can massage the frequency response into the human hearing range. Its fun to do, but it usually doesn't tell you much.
When Michael was gone, the editors got so overwhelmed that Taco had to resort to The Zonk, who had been wearing leather coveralls and living chained in a box in his basement...
That isn't Saturn, it's Altair, and those sounds were made by long dead Krell musicians
I am supprised we did not hear Robbie the Robot ask if we need something!
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Wes Craven Hired By NASA To Reinvigorate Their Program
In an apparent effort to win over their "Fellow Americans," NASA hired Hollywood dream killer Wes Craven to create sound bites to scare the raggity ends off of every internet surfers' eyelashes.
It's on so many web pages it must be true.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
In the original version of 2001, they had Saturn instead of Jupiter as the source of the Big Mystery. Clarke thought it was an "interesting coincidence" that Saturn's rings supposedly formed at about the same time the first humans evolved. (Can't verify whether that's accurate, and am dubious as to the meaning of "coincidence" at that time scale.) The extra difficulty of doing SFX with the rings was just a little bit too much, and they changed it to Jupiter. If they'd stuck with Saturn, imagine the silly comments that this discussion would have!
If you play it backwards, you'll hear:
"All these planets all yours except for Europa. Attempt no landing there".
It says: Paul was really was the walrus...go figure....
I had chili for dinner. 'scuse me.
"All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landings there..."
i wonder if they are going to find a large black slab underground the surface of saturn...
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
Well, if there is some kind of life on Saturn, it's surely gone crazy from the sound.
This is news? Pink Floyd knew this way back when Meddle was released. Listen to Echoes. For a second, thought it was a sample from the song.
Here is a link to NOAA that has several soundclips of unidentified sea noises.
y stery.html
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/vents/acoustics/sounds_m
That you're not listening to the sounds coming from Uranus.
Just in from AP press. NASA scientists (who else) have filtered, frequency shifted and finally decoding this data clip the perplexing message revealed itself to say:
In Soviet Jupiter Space Sounds You
Exactly what I was thinking--early Pink Floyd. I guess they knew what they were doing.
all the same, I'd take mine into the shop if it were making that noise...
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
You might also be interested in http://www.radio-astronomy.net/
Pasted from the website: "Radio Astronomy is an art and science project, which will broadcast sounds intercepted from space, live on the internet and on the airwaves. The project is a collaboration between the art group r a d i o q u a l i a, and radio telescopes located throughout the world. Together they are creating 'radio astronomy' in the literal sense - a radio station devoted to broadcasting audio from our cosmos."
that's weird, before i read the article (seeing it on my RSS bookmarks) i thought this article was going to report on talks of nixing the Saturn car brand.
I heard this when I was a kid watching Forbidden Planet
Wow score one for the 1950's science fiction audio producers.
*DrugCheese rants*
That the planet Saturn, like about 3000 other people, was once a member of the space-rock group Hawkwind, in the early seventies.
It sounds exactly like Space Mountain at Disneyland, you can even hear sounds similar to trains rushing by! How did Walt Know?
from the woooooooooo-woooooooooooo dept.
Mystery solved!
It's Bubb Rub & Lil' Sis checking out their latest dec-o-rashuns.
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
Regardless of those who mock, nitpick, strain at gnats and swallow camels here on /., it's still *cool*. Hearing the "voice" made by a distant planet is thrilling. Sure some nerd can make a similar recording in the basement but this is the real thing.
Fun stuff!
/train
wooo wooo
Oh, sorry, it's my WITH ME. I believe the word you're groping after is "who's". It's a combination of the pronoun "who" and the verb "is". Unlike the the adjective "whose" (square peg) it would work great in that sentence you mangled (round hole).
Sure, cool. Sure, sounds like a sci-fi flick soundtrack... but for sure that is not a "sound" someone would "hear".
This is an arbitrarily distorted representation of radio waves. No one would ever "hear" this, so what's really the point?
Same goes for images, really. Here's an Interesting article about calibration... It shows the possible outputs from the same base images. Compare these two Viking Images.
Everything is relative... Some singers use Auto-Tuners to "sound better". Pr0n images are often photoshopped/ airbrushed to hide flaws, enhance shapes or just faked (cool article and you can google for "fake-detective" for the guy's site)...
Is this "space sound" real? Are these singers singing for real? Are these photos real? What is "real"? Where do you draw the line?
/* TAANSTAFL */
The RIAA on Saturn be suing NASA for all it's worth. Spaceships should be leaving soon to collect or vaporize us all.
Yeah real orig joke there. It was only posted hours after another.
mine rattles a lot and the clutch pedal squeaks...but that's just cause the pos is made of plastic. -Jesse
First post! (just in case I am...)
http://tinyurl.com/9wmle together with some explanation.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
granular synthesis to change it into audio...granular synthesis ignores phase data, because it is spectral based. If they played an actual recording of the waveform instead of just its spectra, I'm sure it would sound very different and a lot more 'natural'. Right now it sounds like a typical granular synth....grainy
That's just an alien playing Half Life and we're picking up the WiFi signals from his wireless sound system... I recognize that track from the Xen levels. I for one welcome our... oh nevermind.
-ubuntu others as you would have others ubuntu you.
I learned to whistle - loud - without the need to stick fingers in my mouth at a fairly young age.
When I whistle with someone at the same capacity, we can fluxuate the tones in a controlled manner, and the heterodyning sounds (imagine the sound you sometimes hear when tuning into LW radio - wooowhipduuuublebleble) are very loud, and feel like mini pick axes trying to hollow out your head.
I think it works fairly easily if two people whistle normally next to each other if they can hold a good tone.
To confirm you're not a script,
please type the word in this image: planted
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Man, that ruins the whole ring it. ^_^
- I voted for Nintendo and against Bush
That, was a scream from the Planet!
Don't you hear it? As if to say "I hurt", "I suffer".
Star trek had talking computers, tri-corders and hypo-sprays and bang! they all happened. Cryogenic freazing we have that! sliding doors with sensors, every store!
Now it turns out planets realy make spooky noises, what else in sci-fi is also true? Will it turn out that all beam weapons only have stun, kill and vaporise settings (no oh that stung a bit but I'm basicaly okay setting?)
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
I'm sorry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all.
\u262D = \u5350
Anyone with basic audio understanding, and half an hour with an old real-ro-real tape deck knows that you can make almost anything sounds like anything else if you alter the time base and frequency.
I bet the same source could be made to sound like Fairies farting around a campfire.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Just in case Mars attacks.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I, for one, welcome our giant space insect overlords.
Philip Glass' lawyers are said to be preparing a new case file...
Did anyone else hear similarities to whalesong?
Allegedly real newspaper headline from 1998:
Man Struck by Lightning Faces Battery Charge
Wow. Now all of those classic astronomers' talk of the Music of the Spheres doesn't sound so antiquated.
Invented by Russian physicist Leon Theremin in the 1920's, the Theremin is not only the predecessor of the synthesizer, it's one of the earliest electronic musical instruments and produces music in relation to the musician's hands in the air! The sound of the Theremin is as eerie as it's beautiful.
Some audio clips: Star Trek Intro, Sinners, Space Cruiser Yamato/Star Blazers, Heterodyne (Commodore64 style!), Rotors of Raga (entire archive)
You too can build your own Theremin. For the less tech savvy, you can always buy a Theremin kit. The Theremin is one of many unusual instruments for you to discover.
If I download these sounds will the record companies try to sue me?
Adventure City Tours
Glad they heard it because how often can astronomers believe what they see? This Hubble picture? Bah! We've got to hear it! http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/ releases/1998/05/
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
I thought that sound was coming from Uranus... (Hey, YOU were thinking it too)
Life, don't talk to me about life.
--Marvin, the paranoid android.
Ok, is it just me?
Or is everyone else singing in their head "And the meek shall inherit the Earth"?
When will Windows be ready for the desktop?
In simple terms this is an "audio plot" of the radio emissions from Saturn's aurora.
They want their 50,000 for unlicensed distribution. They just signed Saturn.
So I know that we get a nice radio signal from plasma in our ionosphere so has anyone done this for Earth's aurora? Are we just as spooky as Saturn?
Not sure why anyone else doesn't understand this as clearly as I do. Saturn is where Hell is. These sounds you are hearing are obviously the moans and cries of the forever damned as they are repeatedly ripped apart. In addition, if you listen to the McGreevy VLF recordings, these are obviously sounds of the doomed souls being dragged to Hell (Saturn) by Satan's minions. Get Yee Hither! Repent!
You beat me to it. I was going to say the first thing I thought of was the opening credits of Forbidden Planet.
I don't remember what the Krell musicians sounded like. Have to go back a watch it again.
Sounds exactly like Cosmic Tones For Mental Healing....
That was fucking awesome.
No. Hell is on Mars, located below one of our research labs.
So then Klaus Schulze was not just a pioneer of electronic music, but a visionaire - his early albums have parts that sound pretty similar to the Saturn sounds. :-)
Just kidding, but it's still pretty damn fascinating.
Hold me?
Pff
Yeah, 'cuz I really like, read through all the other posts before posting mine.
This is Slashdot, dear. We don't even read the articles.
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
Trying playing the sound with Windows Media Player. On the simpler sounds, the visualization is flat. It appears the sounds are outside the normal range of music or speech.
Long live the Speaker Bracelet
Rolo D. Monkey
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/science_fiction/ma rtian_chronicles.html#third
That is interesting.
I've often thought Virgil's description of hell in Dante's Inferno sounded like descriptions of the different moons of the gas giants. The hot burning sulfer of Io, the cold frozen planes of Europa.
duh! sounds can't definitely travel in vacuum.
One thing that strikes me as odd is the "echo" effect. While other freqs vary wildly, this stays fairly constant. I did the math, 27 minutes to 73 seconds of audio is a reduction by a factor of about 22. Estimating the echo to be at about 6 Hz, that means that the interval between "echo" peaks is about 3.7 seconds. Is that the time for an average field line to accelerate a spiralling particle from one pole to the other? (and back?)
Or did the scientists throw in an echo effect? That would certainly keep it constant. Sampling problem?
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
ahh, just a case of bad stomach for a gigantic alien
Sounds like the budget for NASA has been calculated to be exactly what they got in the 50's. If we don't stop the trend, we'll have a false moon landing filmed in a California studio all over again, with a creepy 50's soundtrack this time!
Not to be taken seriously. Go NASA go. (-;
Microsoft is pure dog-ma. FreeBSD is pure cat-ma.
*Serious*
Synthesists use a $30,000 custom spec'd Wiard/Blacet hybrid modular driven by an open source Max/MSP timbral fractalization algorithm with a neurofeedback front end to get this EXACT SOUND. Nasa uses a planet...
Showoffs!!!
Microsoft is pure dog-ma. FreeBSD is pure cat-ma.