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Stellar Seismologists Record "Music" From Stars
niktemadur writes "The BBC reports that a French team of stellar seismologists, using the COROT Space Telescope, have converted stellar oscillations into sound patterns, a relatively new technique that, according to Professor Eric Michel of the Paris Observatory, is already giving researchers new insight into the inner workings of stars. The subtly pulsating, haunting sounds are very similar to artist Aphex Twin's minimalistic nineties album 'Selected Ambient Works, Vol. 2,' only stripping away what little melody it had and leaving just the beat. These and many more recordings from space can be accessed at the Jodrell Bank Center for Astrophysics website, also known as the Jodcast."
From a person who loves listening to that album: What beat? It's ambient. 85-92 had beat. II didn't.
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Maybe Aphex Twin is the Man Who Fell to Earth and is merely making music for those he left behind....
..the RIAA looks to the stars for a new revenue stream.
And are these stars receiving any royalties from these recordings?
If not, then would that make these seismologists Space Pirates?
Yes, this is terribly informative. Maybe it would be better to describe it as like the Art Of Noise, minus any of the group.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Am I the only one who interpreted 'stellar' to mean 'really awesome'? As in 'Some really awesome, talented seismologists Record Music From Stars'?
Man, that was confusing.
This just shows that Pythagoras and Kepler were right!
After discovering The Music Of The Spheres, the pair of philosopher-scientists went on to form the ambient electronica duo P&K. After three moderately successful albums they split, citing creative differences. Pythagoras now teaches high school math in Wichita, KS. Kepler is currently in the Shady Acres Sanitarium.
Roll credits.
The origin of binaural beats has been found.
Scientists would explain, but they're all apparently in the lab "tripping" out to ACID STARDUST.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
4 "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. 5 Who determined its measurements--surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? 6 On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone, 7 when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?"
Mogwai has apparently been doing this since 1997.
HD49933 was much better in its independent days. Ever since signing to Paris Observatory Records, its sound has become too "mainstream pop".
Jodrell Bank Center... is that where Kla-El does his banking
Richard James should sue these thieving bastards. Being a star is no excuse, right RIAA?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
I listened to the sound and there was no similarity at all. ... just like these stars "sounds" are.
They sounded like cheesy 50's sci-fi sound effects which were based on frequency modulation and oscillation
From Wikipedia:
Dr. Fiorella Terenzi is an Italian astrophysicist, author and musician who is best known for taking recordings of radio waves from galaxies and turning them into music. She received her doctorate from the University of Milan but is currently based in the United States.
Terenzi is known for her CD-ROM Invisible Universe which combines music and poetry with astronomy lessons, and for a sexually charged 1998 book about science entitled Heavenly Knowledge. She has also released a number of albums of her music.
She is known as an Apple Computer "AppleMaster", and has collaborated with the likes of Thomas Dolby, Timothy Leary, Herbie Hancock and Ornette Coleman.
When she isn't performing, she teaches astronomy at Pierce College in Los Angeles. As of 2006, she was teaching astronomy at Brevard Community College in Cocoa, FL.
Home Page: http://www.fiorella.com/fiorprofile.htm
Videos: http://video.fiorella.com/
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I also interpreted "stars" as "celebrities" and just figured this was about a new remix album by DJ Seismologist
My God! It's full of stars...
So where is the Galactic equivalent of the RIAA - the people sharing the music from those stars must be stopped!
This comment is for entertainment purposes only. Any similarity to real insight or information is purely coincidental.
Undoubtedly, when the RIAA hears about this, they'll claim copyright over the "Music of the Spheres" and DMCA takedown notices will forthwith be sent to the all galaxies and the telescopes that index them.
The Giant Karl Rove space goat IS playing the universe like a fiddle.
There are a million different ways you could convert any data into audio.
How do the audio recordings relate to the radio signals they received? Without that information, the audio is meaningless. I could make spacey sounding haunting oscillations from data about the movements of my bowels, it's all about how you represent the data.
The only time I have heard true 'sounds from space' is from VLF radio, as the radio frequencies are actually in the audio range.
The Doctor did it already... nothing spectacular, but eerily good.
Warn me about the stars that sound like "come to daddy" or "windowlicker."
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Job 38:2-11 ESV (2) "Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? (3) Dress for action like a man; I will question you, and you make it known to me. (4) "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. (5) Who determined its measurements--surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? (6) On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone, (7) when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy? (8) "Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb, (9) when I made clouds its garment and thick darkness its swaddling band, (10) and prescribed limits for it and set bars and doors, (11) and said, 'Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stayed'?
...every time i compile a new kernel:
cat vmlinuz >> /dev/dsp
now *that* is geek music
I wonder what effect this may have had on the development of music in humans. Can we somehow discern these oscillations, like magnetic fields in the brains of pigeons?
Suppose the timing of all our music is based on oscillations of our own star, Sol. What might the effects be on a planet that orbits a much different star. A planet under the effects of multiple stars? Would an extraterrestrial culture in such a situation have more complex music if it was under such effects?
My God, It's full of stars!
Karnal
I first read the title as "Stellar Scientologists Record "Music" From Stars" then read it correctly, but wondered if it had to do with the RIAA. I think this is a sign that my brain needs more sleep. ;-)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I'm doing science and I'm still alive
i feel fantastic and I'm still alive
while your dying ill be still alive
and when your dead i will be still alive
still alive
still alive
"...according to Professor Eric Michel of the Paris Observatory, is already giving researchers new insight into the inner workings of stars"
Whether this gives researchers new insight into inner workings of stars or inner workings of music is debatable.
Rumor has it that RIAA is already training Space Ninjas, just in case.
erm... the Jodcast is the _podcast_ from Jodrell Bank, not the website. Try http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/ for the actual website for Jodrell Bank.
But the Jodcast is well worth a listen to anyway.
..but now EVERYONE is listening to them.
From the sound of it and from looking at spectrograms of the sounds it question I can safely claim that a few things are misleading about these sounds. I have every reason to think that these sounds have been generated by spectrogram synthesis, that is they analysed the original astro-seismic signal into a spectrogram (an image which is a plot of the frequency components and their amplitude over time) and resynthesised it into a sound so that we could hear it but also so that it wouldn't be too long and boring or too short.
However here's the thing, they used a very poor spectrogram synthesis technique (disclaimer : I consider myself a specialist in spectrogram analysis and synthesis and have made a spectrogram analyser and synthesiser called the ARSS), which consists in modulating the horizontal bands of the spectrogram with sine waves of different frequency. What's worse, they used a linear frequency scale, which means that all these sine waves are separated from each other by a fixed frequency (in our case about 10 Hz), which creates a huge envelope beat at that frequency. What it means is that this "regular repeating pattern" you hear isn't "the entire star is pulsating" as the journalist claims, but rather an artifact of the synthesis technique.
Fortunately this technique, even if it produces an awful sound, conveys the original image in the sound's time-frequency plan almost intact (just as in this example, note the similarity with the sounds in the article), and therefore I can reconstruct the original images they used and resynthesise them using a better technique to obtain a more natural sound. Which I'll post as a reply to this comment.
You just got troll'd!
I correctly resynthesised the two first sounds. The resulting sound can be found here or alternatively here.
As one could have expected, there's nothing remarkable about these sounds, no eerie music, no mysteriously rhythmic beat, it's just one of the band-limited noise you find everywhere in nature, be it the ambient underwater sound of the oceans, the Earth's "hum", the wind, etc...
You just got troll'd!
Gordon Way of WarForward technologies called. He's filing suit for infringing on his Anthem(c) product, developed by Richard McDuff. Read more Dirk Gently[by Douglas Adams]!
Trackball users will be first against the wall.
or did anyone else initially read this as "stellar scientologists"?
Am I the only one that thinks this is actually the background FX track from nearly every 40's-50's low budget scifi movie?
Seriously, the two sample star sounds are a lot like the intro to Forbidden Planet.
There was a story several years ago, either on NPR, or Discovery Channel, about a scientist/doctor in california who had put MRIs to music, was a very interesting story. Not sure if this was programming or something that just happened naturally, but normal MRI sounded harmonius, non normal MRI was discordant.
I have just spent a while looking for that story on google with no luck, there are just too many hits.
If someone know what I am talking about would welcome the link.
The sample they have for the sun sounds eerily like the song Foil from IDM artist Autechre. Song can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghizXIOoHtc
stripping the "melody" away from an ambient song leaves you with only a pulse. it's not surprising in any way that stellar *oscillations* converted to sound result in a pulse. there's science, and there's just random grabbing at stupidity to justify a research grant.
I didn't know space actually sounded like a sci-fi movie!
No, I will not work for your startup