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Stellar Seismologists Record "Music" From Stars

Posted by kdawson on Fri Oct 24, 2008 11:42 AM
from the play-here-comes-the-sun-for-me dept.
Space Media Music Science
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."
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Submission: Stellar seismologist record 'music' from stars by niktemadur (793971)
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  • In other news.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by pak9rabid (1011935) on Friday October 24 2008, @11:52AM (#25499631)
    ..the RIAA looks to the stars for a new revenue stream.

  • Legal Question (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 24 2008, @11:53AM (#25499653)
    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.

    • Re:It's the same, only different. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by zappepcs (820751) on Friday October 24 2008, @12:01PM (#25499829) Journal

      Actually using sound to view data from anything can be quite useful. I have worked in telcomms for some time, and in days gone by listening to the demodulated data as audio from a paging signal was very useful. Engineers can listen to it and know if it is 'right' or 'wrong' without a scope, data tracer, or any equipment at all other than a pager with audio output. I've actually located faults using this.

      Using charts is a way for us to 'see' data in a form that we can readily digest. Using audio to 'hear' the signals from space will allow our brains to quickly digest what the data shows. I'd like to see more of this. We use IR cameras to see wavelengths that we do not typically see with our eyes. Why not use audio to look at radiation from space?

      • Now that I completely agree with. Diagnostics and data analysis via the patterns inherent in sound makes a lot of sense - the human brain is designed to do pattern recognition in raw data for starters and computers could theoretically do pattern recognition for large volumes (no pun intended) of data far more efficiently this way because you are dealing with the information holistically rather than as a serial stream. You can also identify subtle differences in stars by means of sound - a subtle variation t

      • We listen to the sound the gradients in an MR scanner make all the time. You can tell what sequence someone is running by the sound. At the main annual meeting there's a presentation of recordings. I think they put out a CD.

      • The whooooooooshing sound is the point of "minus any of the group" going over your head at hypersonic velocity. (I would have said White Noise, but (a) almost nobody has heard of them, apart from fans of arcane Doctor Who trivia, and (b) I'd have to miss out the bit of excluding the band.)
  • 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.

  • This just shows that Pythagoras and Kepler were right! [skyscript.co.uk]

    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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by night_flyer (453866)

      goes back slightly further back than that...

      Job 38:7 (King James Version)

        7When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

      • I think the Valacuenta goes back at least as far and has a slightly different take on it all.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Jabbrwokk (1015725)
        Good point. But I believe morning stars is another term used to describe angels (Isaiah 14:13-14 KJV):

        How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.

        And apparently there's a link to the Latin root of Lucifer. [wikipedia.org]

        Conclusion: Lucifer was thrown out of heaven for singing too loud and messing up the Music of the Spheres.

      • The most realistic dates for the writing of Job (http://www.jstor.org/pss/1455552) are roughly contemporary with Pythagoras (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoras).

      • Wow, those comics are either some sophisticated post-modern irony or a big bag of suck. You made me look, though ;)
  • The origin of binaural [wikipedia.org] beats has been found.

    Scientists would explain, but they're all apparently in the lab "tripping" out to ACID STARDUST.
  • 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?"

  • I listened to the sound and there was no similarity at all.
    They sounded like cheesy 50's sci-fi sound effects which were based on frequency modulation and oscillation ... just like these stars "sounds" are.

  • Nobody remembers Dr. Fiorella Terenzi? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Master of Transhuman (597628) on Friday October 24 2008, @12:57PM (#25500673) Homepage

    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 [fiorella.com]

    Videos: http://video.fiorella.com/ [fiorella.com]

  • So where is the Galactic equivalent of the RIAA - the people sharing the music from those stars must be stopped!

  • Warn me about the stars that sound like "come to daddy" or "windowlicker."

  • 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!

  • 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. ;-)

  • erm... the Jodcast is the _podcast_ from Jodrell Bank, not the website. Try http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/ [man.ac.uk] for the actual website for Jodrell Bank.

    But the Jodcast is well worth a listen to anyway.

  • 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 bor

    • I correctly resynthesised the two first sounds. The resulting sound can be found here [wikiupload.com] or alternatively here [soundupload.com].

      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...

      • very cool - although i can't speak to your accuracy you might post some supporting documents to fully show you've found a flaw in the report. not to take any fun out of it, because it's pretty cool. But facts are facts..!

        • you might post some supporting documents to fully show you've found a flaw in the report

          Well very simply, here [imageshack.us] is a spectrogram of the two first sounds. It ranges vertically from 200 Hz to 700 Hz, each vertical pixel representing 1 Hz, the horizontal scale is 10 pixels per second and the amplitude is linear with a gamma of 1.5. Each modulated sine is what constitutes a bright horizontal bar, and as you can see each bar is regularly spaced by about 11.3 Hz. It's also clear enough that each "bar" is a sine modulated by what looks like noise, which supports my claim that the original spectrogram

  • I didn't know space actually sounded like a sci-fi movie!

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by owlnation (858981)
      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.

      • Re:Beat? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by CRCulver (715279) <crculver@christopherculver.com> on Friday October 24 2008, @12:16PM (#25500063) Homepage
        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 [amazon.com] 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.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by mechanyx (960689)
        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.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by CRCulver (715279)
          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.

          • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

            by mechanyx (960689)
            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.
            • Well, what has attracted composers like Gubaidulina, Norgard, and Xenakis to the Fibonacci sequence is that such rhythms supposedly have gestalt universally.
      • 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 ...

      • 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 objec

      • So basically what you're saying is that even when there's no pattern there's a pattern?
          • It's spotty. But if you haven't seen the Windowlicker [youtube.com] video yet, do so now (be aware though, probably NSFW for language and big booty action).

          • 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.

            • 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 [ircam.fr].

    • Maybe Aphex Twin is the Man Who Fell to Earth

      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.

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