Music Made With Sounds of Outer Space
Energy sources in the atmosphere, such as lightning, can produce sounds (sferics, tweeks, and whistlers) in the very low frequency (VLF) radio band.
Objects in space - the Sun, planets, stars, quasars, pulsars, galaxies, and active galaxies - all produce signals that, if received (usually through radio astronomy dishes and processed), can be used by a musician as the basis for any kind of composition imaginable.
Scientists with an interest in space-based sounds include:
- Don Gurnett.
- Stephen P. McGreevy.
- Alexander Kosovichev, a Stanford scientist whose researches into the sun's oscillations (and who uploaded the sounds to the net) encouraged Stephen Taylor (see below) to create his album.
- Dr. Fiorella Terenzi has created several works that use sounds derived from celestial radio signals homepage, Space.com entry.
- NASA produced a CD in 1992 from Voyager 1 & 2 recordings of electromagnetic fields processed with digital sampling techniques.
Artists/bands who have included such sounds in their works include:
- Terry Riley, along with the Kronos Quartet, in their album Sun Rings, which used "sounds of the planets recorded by the Voyager mission on its journey to deep space" .
- Stephen Taylor, in the album The Heart of the Sun.
- Robert Schroeder's album Galaxie Cygnus-A used interstellar noise from the distant galaxy in the title
Read more about this topic: Space-themed Music
Famous quotes containing the words outer space, music, sounds, outer and/or space:
“I know, it must have been my imagination, but it makes me realize how desperately alone the Earth is. Hanging in space like a speck of food floating in the ocean. Sooner or later to be swallowed up by some creature floating by.... Time will tell, Dr. Mason. We can only wait and wonder. Wonder how, wonder when.”
—Tom Graeff. Tom Graeff. Young astronomer, Teenagers from Outer Space, after just seeing the invading spaceship through his telescope, and dismissing it (1959)
“It was a poetic recreation to watch those distant sails steering for half-fabulous ports, whose very names are a mysterious music to our ears.... It is remarkable that men do not sail the sea with more expectation. Nothing was ever accomplished in a prosaic mood.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“For sounds in winter nights, and often in winter days, I heard the forlorn but melodious note of a hooting owl indefinitely far; such a sound as the frozen earth would yield if struck with a suitable plectrum, the very lingua vernacula of Walden Wood, and quite familiar to me at last, though I never saw the bird while it was making it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.”
—John Updike (b. 1932)
“The secret ones around a stone
Their lips withdrawn in meet surprise
Lie still, being naught but bone
With naught but space within their eyes....”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)