“A student by the name of Bartholomäus Traubeck created a project entitled YEARS for the specific purpose of converting thin tree rings into music. He did this by using a Playstation Eye Camera, which read and converted the wood grain into music. This information was fed into a laptop running Abelton Live and the musical output is something directly out of a horror film. So, next time you’re walking alone in the woods, think of this music and savor the chills running up and down your spine as you realize that trees, were they able to sing, would terrify you.” - A Tree’s Age Rings Converted Into Music Sounds Like a Horror Score
Scientists Create World’s Tiniest Ear
“Have you ever wondered what a virus sounds like? Or what noise a bacterium makes when it moves between hosts? If the answer is yes, you may soon get your chance to find out, thanks to the development of the world’s tiniest ear. The “nano-ear,” a microscopic particle of gold trapped by a laser beam, can detect sound a million times fainter than the threshold for human hearing. Researchers suggest the work could open up a whole new field of “acoustic microscopy,” in which organisms are studied using the sound they emit.”
Full Story: Sciencemag
Radio waves from said planet recorded by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, time compressed, and shifted down in frequency to an audible range.
Is it possible to grow electronic sounds, as if they were plants in a garden? Why are childhood memories of sound and silence so important to our emotional development? Is it valid to classify audio recordings of wind or electrical hum as musical compositions? Why have the sounds of our environment become so important to sound artists and why is atmosphere so important in music? In Haunted Weather, David Toop asks these questions and gauges the impact of new technology on contemporary music’s sound.
future reading. this book looks amazing, and is the source from which i learned about “space weather radio.”
(via Dark Roasted Blend: Mega Dashboards and Instrument Panels, Part 2)
Vintage audio mixers are beautiful… Radio Studio Gear, Six channels mixer, from Suomi, Finland -
This is the sound of the aurora on Saturn. Pretty eerie, no?
There is no sound in space. Outside planets and stars, molecules are spread out too thin for sound to propagate. It follows, then, that we can’t really hear sounds planets emit into space. But radio waves—electromagnetic waves with wavelengths longer than infrared light—are, as we know, handy for representing sound. And so it makes sense for us to interpret radio waves, whether originally encoding sound or not, as sound. These are radio waves emitted in conjunction with auroras around Saturn’s poles, similar to the northern and southern lights on Earth. They were picked up by the Cassini spacecraft and then interpreted as sound. But the sound was not in the audible range, so it has been downshifted by a factor of 44. And finally, so as not to bore us to death, it has been speeded up by a factor of 22. Realize, then, that many human choices were made in order for us to be able to “listen to space.” But if you can accept that, you can enjoy this.
(via fuckyeahtheuniverse)