Space-themed Music - Music Made With Sounds of Outer Space

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