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Space Science

The Sounds Of Space Near Jupiter 84

Posted by Hemos from the something-new-for-the-eyes dept.
Kumba writes "Found this while perusing NASA's Web site. It's an audio clip produced from radio waves detected near Jupiter by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, and converted to audible sound by some scientists at the University of Iowa. A clip that they had last week was described by the Los Angeles Times as sounding "like a troop of howler monkeys battling underwater." The new audio clip is....difficult to describe in my opinion. I guess it's best left to each listener to determine what it sounds like, but if you've ever wondered what it sounds like out there, this is it." I had a set of five CDs a while back that had collections of sounds made from one of the NASA missions - it was called Sounds of Space or the Universe. Pretty interesting set - but then, of course, like most of my possessions it burned in a house fire and I've been unable to find it since then.
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The Sounds of Space Near Jupiter More

The Sounds of Space Near Jupiter

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  • You can turn any sort of "waves" into thier audio equivalent.

    What's the point?

    Sure it has a little novelty of it, but it's not generally soothing/interesting. I mean, do people actually turn something like this on before they go to bed?

    Instead of the funny screeching noises I just heard, I like the ocean waves. Heck maybe even music?

    I'm just wondering.

  • Howler monkeys near Jupiter again... sounds like a "USA Up-All-Night" plotline to me...
  • ...my astronomy teacher would play entire albums of "The Sounds of Jupiter" in the planetarium dome. Pretty weird stuff; it was supposed to be the radio chatter and the background noise of Voyager's miniature nuclear power supply.

  • I've translated the radio waves (Score:4)

    by typical geek ( 261980 ) on Monday January 08, 2001 @04:42AM (#523892) Homepage
    They sound kind of like this;

    na-fa-lo-ba-nu-ki-li ta-la-ba-ba-fa-to-pu
    ro-lu-fa-ti

    Anyone know where I can get a surplus aircraft carrier?

  • NASA - Symphonies Of The Planets, Volume 2 at least is the voyeger recordings. Cdnow doesn't have it, but half.com does (for les then $5 for many of them).

    Enjoy.

  • Re:I've translated the radio waves (Score:3)

    by don_carnage ( 145494 ) on Monday January 08, 2001 @04:45AM (#523894) Homepage
    I think what you need is a little REASON.

    --
  • In space, nobody can here you claim "First Post"! Or..

    What does a goatse.cx troll sound like in zero gravity?

  • Play it backwards (Score:3)

    by qwerty823 ( 126234 ) on Monday January 08, 2001 @04:46AM (#523896)
    and you can hear the satanic messages that NASA has hidden in it!
  • The radio waves they found is prolly from some dying star that just happens to emit what seems to us to be radio waves. I don't think "howler monkeys battling underwater" would send us the live audio. Then again it could be some of our radio waves that bounced off something and are coming back but are now faster/slower or degrated that it was in it's original broadcast.
  • Uh.. Unrelated?


    Seeka
  • WOW!! You can see the sounds? What have you been smoking, and why aren't you sharing.
  • you can just make out a synthetic voice repeating over and over, "I'm sorry Dave, we are not going back to Earth again - no you can't have access to the XSDIMM removal tool Dave - you know what happened LAST time"
  • On something of such questionable usefulness as this. Its a bit pointless isn't it ?

    Personally I think all space research should be canned until we have solved the problems of life here on Earth.That means no more NASA until we have eradicated poverty and hunger in the third world, put a stop to global warming, pollution, corporatism, and the myriad other environmental issue we face.

    We do not have much time. The sea levels are rising even as I write this.

  • I'm at school right now trying this, and the power button of the speaker was off, and suddenly this sound just jumps out at me... "tweet tweet dat tweet tweet dat".. This is very.. Interesting. However, I doubt it signals any real life. I could hear the same thing coming from some kind of wood-train whistle type of thing.


    Seeka
  • It kinda sounds like the intro to the "Seven Samurai" remake by Orbital.

  • Aside from the "Symphonie of the Planets" CD set, there are some artists who use these sounds in teir work. I remember Lustmord of having a side project called "Arecibo" which uses the sounds gathered by the Arecibo telescope (what a coincidence !) resulting in a sort of minimalistic music - I guessed it was called deep space ambient at that time.

    The Arecibo album was called "Trans Plutonian Transmissions" IIRC... Very trancy stuff.
  • This doesn't qualify, its more like "look, noise, its from space isn't it cool?", but there are useful reasons to do this. It's all part of understanding data, we usually do this visually by taking some massive amount of data, perform filtering on it (like a low pass, high pass or band pass filter for instance), and applying a mapping function to it (data that falls between here and there goes into this bin, bins with this much amplitude are coloured this way).

    I know people who can analyze mechanical problems in machinery through a stethoscope for instance.

  • Re:House fire (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Hemos is Homeless [slashdot.org] - 10/16/99. Funny shit.
  • "...if you've ever wondered what it sounds like out there, this is it."

    It's hardly "what it sounds like out there"; it doesn't sound like anything out there, since it's a vacuum. What's happened is that phenomena which humans can't experience directly (radio waves) have been converted into phenomena that we can (sound).

    Now, of course, this is what's happening every time you draw a graph (where a mass of data becomes readable shapes, lines and dots) or use your watch (where the internal state representing the date becomes LED readout or angular configuration of the hands), so this kind of abstraction is a vital tool in making sense of the world. But that doesn't mean that we can take these recordings and say "So this is what it sounds like out there!" (Compare someone seeing a map of the Internet [thinkgeek.com] and saying "Aha! So that's what the Internet looks like!")

    M

  • GOD IS ALIVE!!!! (Score:4)

    by fluxrad ( 125130 ) on Monday January 08, 2001 @05:00AM (#523908)
    and aparently he rides a really rusty trike.


    FluX
    After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
  • Maybe I just had an idiot for an astronomy teacher in school, but in the vaccuum of space... how can you have sound?
    ---
    seumas.com
  • Sounds like someone pushing an empty trolly through an empty supermarket.

    Apparently.

    -- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!

  • Or from a less reputable vendor: 10-cds [body-mind.com] for a gob of different stuff. --Multics

  • What is sounds like out there (Score:4)

    by Ace905 ( 163071 ) on Monday January 08, 2001 @05:11AM (#523912) Homepage
    "if you've ever wondered what it sounds like out there, this is it."

    I'm sure people are going to mention this, so I thought I'd be first;

    There is *no* sound in space. None at all.

    I'm not saying that these audio clips are not interesting, or that they don't necessarily contain some sort of useful data. But the fulfillment factor in listening to these should be the same as looking at a graph of x vs. y; because if you think about it, way out in the cold depths of space, your ears do not pick up sound because there is no medium to transfer sound.

    What's more is, were a small event to occur which normally should be heard here on earth, ie; two small rocks colaid; you wouldn't hear that either, because these are radio waves. Larger events, you can hear, but they are a reflection of things you do not see or relate to properly, since once again, these are radio waves and not vibrational waves caused by friction.

    My point is, don't believe the hype: when people tell you it's possible to get a CD of sounds from space, what you're really getting is a small selection of the huge radio-spectrum converted to screechy, unintelligible garble. For that matter, it is possible to give any radio signal a certain characteristic (ie: easy to listen to, noisy screeching) because you decide the method used to represent that wave as a sound wave; since they are wholly different.

    Who's to say that these radio-waves to sound-waves you hear would even sound the same were another person to take the raw data and convert it to sound; they probably [myhometechie.com] wouldn't. So really, you're hearing 1 person (or 1 small group of peoples) interpretation of data put to unintelligible garble.

    I hate fads.

  • ...kill something...kill the pigs? Helter....shelter?
  • ...I do and I appreciate the media reference.

    I will now go and chuckle heartily.

    OK,
    - B
    --

  • If you listen very carefully, you can hear jingle bells.

    (You also need some imagination).
    --

  • A good example of the problem with converting radio waves to sound waves:

    These radio waves were detected at very low frequencies. That means they have a very long wavelength [myhometechie.com]; (ie:) physically, their wave length could be measured in meters.

    When you convert this to sound, you end up with base of such a low wavelength, a modern speaker probably could not produce it. If it could, it would probably be outside the range of human hearing. If you could hear it, it would be very bass-y, and not high-pitched such as in the example.

    This means that in even a direct translation to audible sound, the radio waves frequency was shifted into the audible sound-wave spectrum. This also means the researchers decided exactly how much to shift it, and so it really *doesn't* sound like the radio wave would -- could your ears hear radio waves.

  • Well, there are certainly no sounds in a vacuum. But that is not really what we have here. The sensors are partially picking up radiation due to shockwaves in a plasma. These waves can arguably be calles soundwaves.

  • So really, you're hearing 1 person (or 1 small group of peoples) interpretation of data put to unintelligible garble.

    However, if the radio waves were transmitted by something intelligent (ie., a troop of howler monkeys battling underwater) then there could be some pattern or message discernable by hearing the sound equivalent. For example, if the radio waves were AM modulated to carry something like morse code then you could hear the code if the correct conversion was done audibly.

    NASA might do this type of conversion for any signal as a simple means of checking for a patterns in the radio signals. Then perhaps someone at NASA someday realized that there was a musical quality to their converted signals and thought, "this is better than zamphire music near crashing waves", and then decided to market it.

  • I wonder if they've read Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow, in which a researcher at Aricebo feeds the signal through a sound system to discover alien singing...


    Hacker: A criminal who breaks into computer systems
  • The Arecibo album was called "Trans Plutonian Transmissions" IIRC... Very trancy stuff.

    Sweet. I just downloaded this after reading your comment. I like it. I'll have to check Ozone next time I'm downtown and see if there's a way to get a copy.
    ---
    seumas.com

  • Sounds of Jupiter
    Sounds of Jupiter- over 40 songs from the
    Titan of the Trebleclef! Includes classic hits like...

    My Life Revolves Around You (and the Sun)
    ble ble fa do do ezzzzzzz da...

    Gases for the Masses
    zel to ba ba fa...

    and

    There's No Where Like Your Southern Hemisphere
    jop jop yum jop jop yum ooooooo

    Act now to order this 2 CD set and we'll send you the "Barabara Streisand Sings to Uranus" single, ABSOUTELY FREE!

  • Gee - why stop there?!? (Score:3)

    by SpiceWare ( 3438 ) on Monday January 08, 2001 @05:52AM (#523922) Homepage
    This internet thing you're using isn't solving hunger in the third world - might as well unplug it. Don't forget the movies you watch or the music you listen too, they're not helping poverty either.

    Bah - arguments like this against the space program really upset me. If we were to put off space research until all the problems are Earth are solved, then we're doomed to die as a species when the sun burns out.

  • I fully agree with 1) and 2) but I also think space research is a waste of effort since we cannot even feed people here on earth. Its a bit like adding insult to injury that starving people all around the world look up and see the "international" space station ($527bn and counting) orbiting over them every 80 minutes like some giant international insult.

    You are thinking along the right lines with 1) and 2). Think a bit harder and you'll see that I am correct. Life is not "Star Trek" however much you might want it to be that way.

  • ... lots of drunken crickets in a washing mashine set to fast dry.

    --

  • There is *no* sound in space. None at all.

    Sure, there is! Sound is just pressure waves in gas, so if there is a gas, and there are waves in it, there is sound. The only place there is no sound at all, is if you've got a perfect vacuum, but I haven't seen a lot of those lately. ;-)

    Now, audible sound is a completely different matter. :-)

    I'm not quite sure what these guys have done. Apparently, they've converted radio waves, and you are right, it is not necessarily meaningful, and indeed in most cases it is completely meaningless, to convert radio waves (electromagnetic radiation) to sound waves (pressure waves in gas) and call it the "Sound of Space". If it had been gravtiational radiation, it would have been more fun.

    It could be meaningful (at least a bit), if the radio waves had been created by some pressure waves in gas, so that the radio waves resemble the original pressure waves, and many such processes are imagineable.

    Now this is far from clear to me from the link, but isn't this the case here: That the radio waves have been created by pressure waves in the plasma, and so when the radio waves are converted to sound, it shares characteristics with the original pressure waves? It might not be that bad.... :-)

  • Links: Where to buy the CDs (Score:3)

    by Alien54 ( 180860 ) on Monday January 08, 2001 @06:10AM (#523926) Journal
    Looks like the 5 cd set refered to above is Here [body-mind.com]. And others that might be neat are Here [body-mind.com].

    Of course, this is all new age type aesthetics. Some folks may be uncomfortable with this.

    another possibly useful space hobby page with multimedia stuff is here [hobbyspace.com]

    So maybe Hemos can replace his collection.

  • The Delta Sleep System uses sounds from Voyager because they transmit? in delta waves that help put you to sleep. And if anyones intrested the Theta System from relaxation company is the best study aid in the world
  • Hmm, this could only mean that those monkeys that got evolved by the monolith have made it to Jupiter and are now waging a submarine war for control the oceans of Europa. It's the only logical conclusion, this is 2001, after all.

    ^. .^
    ( @ )

    Soylent Foods, Inc.
  • I can't make a translation but it sounds like a voice is screaming...

    "Liberate tu te me ex inferes!"

  • This is why I was so disappointed when that probe went AWOL last year -- it had a proper audio microphone onboard and was set to send the ACTUAL sounds of Mars back to us. Why would anyone want to listen to radio waves rendered as sound when we could have heard the real thing? Wanna hear Mars! Wanna hear Mars!

    http://www.blitzbasic.com/

  • You forgot the third anime law of physics.

    #3 - Law of Sonic Amplification, First Law of Anime Accoustics
    In space, loud sounds, like explosions, are even louder because there is no air to get in the way.

    http://www.tapanime.com/fun/animelaws.html
  • Good point.

    I've always liked Anonymous Cowards :)

  • i think you missed the snowcrash ref

    I think he didn't.
  • ...except Europa. Attempt no landings there."

    Right. Like I'm really in PH33R of some anonymous coward alien race that never shows its face.

  • Playing the clip backwards has yielded an interesting message in English! The discovered message is as follows:

    "You must leave the area around Jupiter within 2 days. Something is going to happen. Something wonderful."

    --
  • "The sea levels are rising even as I write this"

    That's called the tide. Hang on for 6 hours then it'll start falling again.

    Seriously, what adverse affect on the world's weather patterns do you see arising from this? None.

    How much more effect would it have if the USA (mainly, although there were other guilty parties) had NOT demanded a relaxing of the already lax new emissions levels? A hell of a lot more of a positive effect.

    --

  • gawddam scientists, fly all the way to jupiter and still don't know how to use bladeenc...

  • I must have missed the part where NASA shipped a bunch of howler monkeys and shopping carts to Jupiter to make the recording. I wonder if they where testing the effects of long term space consumerism on them.
  • $ cat kcore > /dev/dsp

    Sounds better, too!
  • I'm not that smart of a guy. Just you're average Joe on the street, so forgive me if this question seems kind of dumb. Do you mean to tell me that something as huge and violence as the Big Bang didn't make any noise at all? A completly silent exploision or implosion or whatever that created universes was completly silent?
    It depends on where you were listening. If you were outside of the Big Bang then there would be silence, since outside of this event there was no matter to conduct sound vibrations. As the leading edge of the big bang passed you there would be noise, but the amplitude of the noise would vary depending on the density of matter.
  • Is there by chance an "epidemic" on the Clavius section of moon, preventing even emergency landings of Russian spacecraft? I think some gentlemen up there in space suits have uncovered a geometric black artifact and shown it to the sun, awaking it from it's 4 million year slumber.

    So I wonder if Stanley's spirit is rubbing it into Arthur's face, being that the sounds have come from Jupiter, not Saturn. Then again, the Cassini is only swinging around Jupiter for a gravity speed boost, en route to Saturn, coinciding with Arthur's version....
  • If you increase the speed four or five times and add an echo, it sounds a bit like a tropical storm, or thunder above a waterfall with thousands of cricket-like creatures chirping below. I was bored.
  • The audio sample on this page [nasa.gov].
  • Yeah, yeah, it's gotta be a troll, but I'm helpless to resist.

    First, of course, as long as we're using troll logic, putting this radio data into sound form cost so little of "the taxpayers money" that I can't see why anyone would care. If you really do, fine, it was *my* money that went to pay for it, and I give them retroactive permission.

    But you say you don't want any space exploration until we've got our act together down here. Right. Uh-huh. Pop quiz: what technology lets us(a) measure atmospheric conditions, including temperature, ozone & pollution levels, humidity, wind patterns, etc. over the entire planet, (b) essay land usage over the entire planet, (c) keep track of arctic ice packs (d) measure water temperature & sea levels, and (e) communicate all this information around the world so we can act on it?

    Gosh, maybe satellite technology? Sure, let's abandon that! It hasn't helped us at all!

    Not to mention that space is such an unusual environment that simply developing the technology to explore it leads to new insights and discoveries. You have no idea how much modern medical technology (even the mass-produced stuff that's made it to third-world countries) owes to the space program and the utter necessity of having small, low-power, reliable medical sensors and other medical equipment. Not to mention computer technology, materials science, etc.

    Could this stuff have been developed without going into space. Sure. Would it have? I doubt it. Necessity is really the mother of invention and without it, without being forced to find new ways to do things, engineers will use the tried-and-true ways.

    Do you honestly think that studying the environments on other planets won't spark new insights about our own? Mars had water once, and doesn't now. Why? What might that imply for our Earth?

    Then, of course, there are even more practical reasons for research into space technology. You are worried about global warming. Why not generate power with orbiting solar panels? Beam the power down to Earth in a form that makes it through the atmosphere efficiently (e.g. microwaves) and suddenly we don't need to burn so much fossil fuel. Or just put the nuclear plants in space the same way. If there's a meltdown, it's 100,000 miles away, and if we're really worried, we just send a robot over there with a rocket to accelerate it to escape velocity and drop it in the sun.

    Do you think even poor people would benefit from the ultrapure chemicals that could be synthesized in space (e.g. pharmeceuticals)? What can we make in microgravity that we can't here? We hardly know, we've barely even tried!

    Ah, well, lunch is over, back to work.

  • ... the marching ant armies on the television screen, when there's no station?
  • When you play it backwards, its Cowboy Neil singing "Alvin and the Chipmunks"
  • Hmmm...looks like you really thought this one through. Let's see now: NASA spends about $14 Billion a year, which is like the noise in the military budget.

    And what does it do with all that money? Well, a few billion run the biggest earth science surface and satellite measurement program on the planet. Which monitors daily the status of sea level change and global pollution, amongst many other issues and looks for long term change and the possible impacts such change might have.

    No more NASA till we solve hunger? Here's a better one. Let's cancel schools and universities and hospitals till we solve world hunger and global warming.
  • Earthlings, greetings from the mighty slarg slugbuster, player of the planet-flute !

    It's nice to see such primitive beings attempting to analyse my music, I will now fine tune your solar system

    (once I can find my towel that is...)

    Muuuuuuuuuuuu hahahhahaha heeeeeeeeeee hah urp brap pardon me muuuuuuuuuu hahahahehehe eeeeehehehhehehehe

  • Are they sure it's in orbit around Jupiter and not under my car?

  • OR it could be distorted radio waves from Earth distorted and reflected/refracted through various sources. I wonder if anyone has tried adjust the waves to take into acount for this. Then again it could have been distorted by the Earth's atmosphere, and we'd find out that is was a song played by some astronaut that was being silly after long hours of research.
  • They've messed the frequency up a bit, but it's definitely...

    The Clangers! [clangers.co.uk]

  • haha.. great reference. Remind me not to go in that neighbourhood ok?

  • about as meaningful as many images (Score:3)

    by q000921 ( 235076 ) on Monday January 08, 2001 @09:34AM (#523953)
    I think it makes sense to take this kind of data and present it in audio form, just like it makes sense to present X-ray data and other invisible data to a 2D image. Neither will usually give you strong scientific results by themselves, but they may give you a better feel for the data you are dealing with, in particular if you understand the mapping and the physics behind it. If you don't, you can still just admire it for its intrinsic aesthetics.

  • fly all the way to jupiter and still don't know how to use bladeenc

    Better yet, use LAME Audio MP3 Encoder [sulaco.org]. Despite the name, it's reported to have better subjective quality than bladeenc. And if you can't figure out how to use it, here's a cheat sheet:

    lame -h -v -m m rpws_010104.wav
    -h is best precision math; -v is VBR; -m m is mono; rpws_010104.wav is the name of a RIFF WAVE file.
    Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them? [pineight.com]
  • I have to agree, this doesn't really mean a damn thing. These are converted _radio_ waves. So what?!? It's foolish to say "this is what space sounds like." No, this is what a converted radio wave sounds like!

  • If there's a Big Bang and no one is around to hear it, does it truly make a sound?

  • I hate fads

    I hate irrelevant [geocities.com] links inserted into a comment just to draw hits for someone [slashdot.org]'s lame attempt at becoming a dot-com millionaire.

  • At this URL:
    http://www-pw.physics.uiowa.edu/space-audio/
    there are .wavs of earths magnetosphere. one even sounds like voices!
  • The cassini probe doesn't exist. Heres how they made those sounds:

    1. walk out back with cheap microphone, record crickets, amplify till they're loud enough
    2. give recording to several well-known rap stars who have recently fallen on hard times. get them to sign an NDA so they don't talk about why they've been remixing crickets for the past three weeks
    3. take remixes, splice them all together, run through noise reduction and high pass filters to remove added bass beat.
    4. now run that through some cheesy compression for that "outer space" sound, decompress and post the uncompressed result.

    there ya go, instant space sounds. With the right marketing you'll be able to hit #1 on the charts - instant sucsess.
  • In my former life as a Sonar Operator I had access to both digital and analog processors. Listening to everything from whale farts to the latest man-made machine I found that the 'old analog technology' gave the best rendering every time.

    This is all very nice, that someone in Iowa figured out a way to convert data to sound but and I repeat BUT there is nothing even close to true analog sound. This article only proves once again that given the time and money someone will find a way to come up with some absolutely worthless result.

    Besides, sound cannot travel in a vaccum and there are no whales in space.

  • Who in the hell moderated the message down that I'm replying to?

    This guy's right.

  • This post gave me the urge to go out and hug the nearest tree. Not.

    I mean this to be personal so...The only thing that needs to be "canned" is Flabdabb.

    Please Downgrade the root post to Troll

    Unix, Linux, Open Source, Slashdot Rules.

  • There is *no* sound in space. None at all.

    Actually, according to the 3rd Law of Anime Physics:

    3.
    Law of Sonic Amplification, First Law of Anime Accoustics - In space, loud sounds, like explosions, are even louder because there is no air to get in the way.

  • I like this sound clip. It is calming to listen to, especially when repeated quietly in the background. Very calming.

    I wish the web page would have more information about how it was created. Which frequencies were recorded? Was it AM, FM, or some other technique? How were the sound waves generated from the raw data? If anybody has the answers, please post them.


    Super eurobeat from Avex and Konami unite in your DANCE!

  • They must have been using the geiss plugin for winamp. That's some pretty freaky shit
  • Your astronomy teacher was right, you can't have sound in space. That's why these sounds were transmitted via radio waves. How do you think astronauts communicate with Houston?

  • The annoying sound of the wind whistling through a tiny gap in the window you get in a car when driving along at 70mph...
  • Right, but that doesn't displace the fact that 'sound' and 'radio waves' are two distinctly seperate things. Radio waves are not immediately audible without conversion. Saying that these are "sounds of space" is like graphing a person's weight loss/gain over a month and then converting each point on the graph into an audible transation and calling that the "sound of weight loss".
    ---
    seumas.com
  • Frequency is the inverse of the Period for the wave. The period of a wave is the time between the start of the wave & the end of the wave.

    This means Frequency is directly related to the propagation time of the wave. A longer wave has a lower frequency in actuality; but that's relative to the propagation time for the wave. Any wave can look long if you analyze it under the right timing conditions.

  • You know, there's a reason they call it "Anonymous Coward" -- I never moderated anything, only suggested that it be modded down. Nice to know that while I'm reading my nice clean threads, I get to run over something completely unrelated. It's almost as bad as the goatse.cx guys. Come back in a couple years when you're old enough to politely respond to a comment. Thanks


    Seeka
  • Can you tell me why that's offtopic? It's a story about what it sounds like and that's what I thought it sounded like. Do you mark down everyone that expresses an opinion that doesn't exactly match your own?

    --

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