Sounds from Saturn
NASA posted some wonderfully trippy sounds collected from Saturn and its moons. For example, one is the sound of winds on Titan, another is magnetometer data from Enceladus translated into audio. The weird recordings remind me of avant-garde electroacoustic music from the 1950s and 1960s.Link (via New Scientist)
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It seems the Link goes to a Wikipedia entry on electroacoustic sounds. The link to the actual sounds is this:
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/sounds/
Catchy.
Thanks for the link Erissian.
...To really have some fun with the WAVs, load them into Windows Media Player and start futzing around with the Visualizations. Most people never see the Visualizations operate with minimal tone variations, and it can give you clues as to how each Viz works WRT the sounds it has to work with, especially with the Particle effects.
...No doubt those using RealPlayer or some other 3rd party player will have similar results.
Fixed! Thanks, Erissian. I got sidetracked into looking at the history of electroacoustic music and then pasted that link by accident.
Nice way to be sidetracked though, David. What an interesting field of music it is... especially to makers and their fans.
Also, the failed Mars Polar Lander was going to have a microphone. Then another lander mission was canceled which was also going to have one. Hopefully someday soon we will hear Mars.
Oh my God! I'm on the Forbidden Planet!
Nice to see that NASA's $20 BILLION annual budget is being put to good use.
The American people definitely need more avant-garde electroacoustic music - and it's good to know that NASA has filled that need!
@Allison, I think that this kind of thing is actually a valuable way to make science a little more tangible.
@Allison and David,
I think it, like many scientific discoveries when they first happen, might have all sorts of practical implications we don't realize. People complain about the billions spent on the Apollo program but don't remember that without it, we wouldn't have things like velcro and kidney dialysis.
This is part of what I think might be considered a distinct genre: "Science Music" or "Data Music." There have been a few cd releases of scientific data translated into audio/music, Bob L. Sturm's "Music From the Ocean" comes to mind, the data of currents and temperatures transposed into audio, but I also know of people translating parts of genetic sequences into sheet music, resulting in oddly baroque sounding pieces. There may be more examples at Sturm's website:
http://www.composerscientist.com/
Hey, does anyone know what the copyright status is on those files? Are they public domain as works of the US government?
They are public domain works as are all NASA releases. They do prefer it if you credit them though.
"Nice to see that NASA's $20 BILLION annual budget is being put to good use.
The American people definitely need more avant-garde electroacoustic music - and it's good to know that NASA has filled that need!"
..."Allison", on behalf of the more enlightened majority of us who support NASA, it's goals *and* its results - especially ones like this - I'd like to offer you the opportunity to take this particularly luddite-based comment and find a black hole of your own choosing to return it to where it belongs.
[Shakes head in complete disgust at the lack of a global cleansing policy towards internet trolls]
I knew there were aliens, I just didn't know they had such poor taste in music.
@Allison
Luddites have computers?
That second one, "Radar Echoes from Titan's Surface," sounds like somebody on Titan's playing old-school Pole Position, or something. Man, what's the point of visiting other planets if they don't at least have better video games than us?
Looks like the Atari logo...
I realize many people believe that NASA spending is wasteful. Nonetheless, I enjoy reading about discoveries such as these.
In the first passage in Arthur C Clarke's novel Imperial Earth, Duncan Makenzie, the protagonist, finds a channel that is connected to a microphone on the surface of his home moon, Titan:
"He was listening to the voice of the wind as it sighed and whispered above the lifeless landscape a hundred meters above his head."
Pretty cool that I can listen to a sound from the year 2276...
Saturn totally ripped off the Wogglebug.
dnotice hah! yeah! looks like a cropped atari fuji.
I've had these Saturn tracks playing in my iPod all day at work (after first converting to Apple Lossless) and the lasting impression I have is that they sound like some of Sun Ra's more atmospheric works (circa 1960-62). Also they have a bit of Paul Bley in them.
Still, the sounds are fantastic no matter how you slice them, and marvelous to think that the sounds are actually from outer space.
Excellent!
Allison
Allison, is that a change of heart?
It could be the voice of God.
It could be the voice of God.
Everyone knows god speaks from Uranus.