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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."
..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.
It's pretty much impossible to produce music without a beat (rhythm). Even Cage's 4 minutes and 33 seconds probably has a beat most of the time. Without beat it would also be monotone. Every time you introduce a new tone there's a beat. That beat maybe far apart from another, and it may be irregular, but it's there. It doesn't need drums and a 4/4 progression to have a beat.
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.
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.
Agreed. A "beat" doesn't necessarily imply periodic rhythm. I'm surprised, however, that the story here mentions on Aphex Twin and not an even more topical piece of music. In the 1980s, the French spectralist composer Gerard Grisey wrote a major concert work called Le Noir de l'etoile for six percussionist. The material is partly based on sounds from pulsars, and in fact during the concert a radio telescope is to be used to directly pipe in the sound of a specific pulsar. Grisey's work at this time was increasingly fascinated by musical time, and the contrast between the clockwork of the pulsar and more organic aperiodic rhythms is a major concern of the piece.
A number of pieces are accepted to have no beat and there is a variety of music thought to be ametrical or with long periods of ametricity. Take Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima or Xenakis' Metastasis for example. I've written a number of ametrical works. There are even works with percussion that could be argued to be ametrical such as the opening and title track to Gorgut's Obscura.
Everything in the universe is made of one element, which is a note, a single note. Atoms are really vibrations, you know, which are extensions of THE BIG NOTE ... Everything's one note. Everything, even the ponies. The note, however, is the ultimate power, but see, the pigs don't know that, the ponies don't know that ...
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
It was Aphex Twin's wacky predecessor Stockhausen who claimed he was born on the planet Sirius and sent on a musical mission to Earth. Fortunately Richard D. James is a lot more level-headed.
Aren't the rhythms of the beginning of Metastasis based on the Fibonacci sequence? IIRC, there's a woodblock part that clearly marks out durations that the listener can relate to.
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
In Formalized Music Xenakis details a lot of his mathematical process but a statement like, "that the listener can relate to" makes a LOT of assumptions about the listener. I certainly wouldn't identify a beat with those hits. Everything in sound has an underlying mathematical structure. It doesn't mean that structure necessarily translates to anything higher order or is perceptible.
Those silly Earthlings... we beamed all of our rap music into space to get rid of it and they're actually trying to listen to it
Aphex Twin's ambient albums are some of the best music I've ever listened to. Have you listened to them? I can't vouch for his other stuff, though.
http://pinopsida.com
Well, what has attracted composers like Gubaidulina, Norgard, and Xenakis to the Fibonacci sequence is that such rhythms supposedly have gestalt universally.
Do you hear a beat there? Regardless as to whether or not some ppl might hear a beat in Metastasis, my point was that there are pieces that don't have a beat and I still think that is the case. There are too many bizarre pieces by guys like LaMonte Young and Wolfgang Schorn. I would argue that even something like Wolfgang Rihm's 8th string quartet has no beat.
It's spotty. But if you haven't seen the Windowlicker video yet, do so now (be aware though, probably NSFW for language and big booty action).
12:50 - press return.
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
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.
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
...every time i compile a new kernel:
cat vmlinuz >> /dev/dsp
now *that* is geek music
You really ought to listen to some of the others. Richard D. James will go down in history as one of the greatest electronic composers of the 20th century. He's right up there with Brahms, Bach, Stravinski, etc., IMHO. There isn't a single electronic composer out there who hasn't been influenced by him.
Get your hands on a copy of the Richard D. James album or Windowlicker, and enjoy.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
You've just defined "beat" into a meaningless term.
When people say that music has a "beat", they are referring to a subjective feeling, not "every time you introduce a new tone". At some point, while there's still technically some sort of rhythm, even if a non-repeating random "rhythm", it's absurd to call it a beat or a rhythm, except to show how the term isn't really an objective one, but really subjective, which is what music is in the first place.
Once you start treating subjective musical terms as objective, or take them literally, you end up with the absurdity of calling everything music. Music is often defined as rhythm and melody. You've just stated that everything with any sounds is rhythm, and melody can just be defined as a "series of different tones, even a series of one", ergo, any sound at all is music...
But that's not really true, is it? Unfortunately, for some, you can't objectively state that that's not true, only subjectively state it, which seems to throw them into a philosophical tailspin.
proabably has a beat most of the time? which part in the score are you referring to?
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.
So basically what you're saying is that even when there's no pattern there's a pattern?
You just got troll'd!
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
Compared to what Stockhausen was doing forty years earlier, the music of Aphex Twin is trite and banal. There are such amazing possibilities in electronics. Too bad Richard D. James doesn't exploit them, instead playing it safe. If you want amazing electronic music these days, look to IRCAM.
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