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Space Science

Listen to the Sky 188

Posted by michael from the snap-crackle-pop dept.
disposable60 writes "Sky Ear will be a one-night event in which a glowing "cloud" of mobile phones and helium balloons is released into the air so that people can dial into the cloud and listen to the sounds of the sky."
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Listen to the Sky More

Listen to the Sky

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  • But the question is... (Score:5, Funny)

    by josh glaser ( 748297 ) on Saturday April 10, 2004 @02:03AM (#8823156)
    ...who will answer?
  • What is the point of this? Presumably they will just hear a few wind noises as it blows past the microphones?

    Just out of interest, who is putting up the money for this? They sound like they are spending other people's money with no comeback

  • Neat (Score:5, Funny)

    by Bishop, Martin ( 695163 ) on Saturday April 10, 2004 @02:06AM (#8823166)
    I personally like calling stupid people to hear the echo of my voice in their empty head.

    • Re:Neat (Score:3, Funny)

      by Cruciform ( 42896 )
      Do you use single weave or braided string with your can? :)

    • Re:Neat (Score:5, Funny)

      by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Saturday April 10, 2004 @03:59AM (#8823477) Homepage Journal
      "I personally like calling stupid people to hear the echo of my voice in their empty head."

      I personally like calling stupid people to hear the echo of my voice in their empty head.
    • A lot of the comments attached to this story are quite negative - What's the point, waste of money and so on. This is more art than a scientific experiment, pretty obvious when you RTFA and see that pretty coloured lights are being used. This would actually be quite an impressive sight, mobile phones or not. Now the whole 'sounds of the sky' thing is a bit silly, you're not going to be hearing anything really amazing, but the article doesn't mention if the phones will have their speakers disabled. If th

  • Sound of ringtones (Score:5, Funny)

    by solid ( 15355 ) on Saturday April 10, 2004 @02:06AM (#8823167)
    Hope they turn off the ringtones / vibrators.

    *imagines the sound of mission impossible theme over an earpiece*

    • Re:Sound of ringtones (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      yeah, funny how the sky sounds like mommy's battery torch with no light.
  • But almost scary at the same time. Anyone plan on watching this?
    • What's so fscking incredible or scary about listening to some wind blowing in the microphone of a mobile phone?

      I think this is one of the most stupid experiments I've ever heard...

      People sometimes fail to have a little bit of common sense and a bit of scientific knowledge to be able to predict the outcome of certain kinds of experiments without actually performing them.

  • what if there's a storm? (Score:4, Funny)

    by tsunamifirestorm ( 729508 ) on Saturday April 10, 2004 @02:06AM (#8823170) Homepage
    would we get to see cell phones zapped by lightning?

  • Roaming (Score:5, Funny)

    by subzerorz ( 769341 ) on Saturday April 10, 2004 @02:06AM (#8823171) Homepage
    Would that be considered roaming?
    It would be interesting to listen to during a storm or tornado.

  • 25M? 60M? miles? meters? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Saint Stephen ( 19450 ) on Saturday April 10, 2004 @02:09AM (#8823179) Homepage Journal
    Do they mean 1000 balloons will be enclosed in a 25 mile net at a height of 60 miles?

    Or a 25 meter net at a height of 60 meters?

    The first seems ridiculous; the second is not very high.
    • They definitely mean meters; they are planning to keep the balloons tethered to the ground.

      It does seem like they aren't really in the sky at 60 meters.

    • Re:25M? 60M? miles? meters? (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Lower case m means metres you pagan imperialist. :)
    • No, only 99 Luftbaloons. Dunno about the rest tho.
    • Since the atmosphere is only 12 miles high, it is obvious that they must mean a 25 mile net at the depth of 60 meters. The weight of the cellphones needed to fill it probably can't make a bigger crater than that. If it makes a sphere, it has a volume of 3.3E13 m3. Each m3 can probably contain about 5000 cell phones, each weighing in at ~200g. This comes to 1.7E17 cell phones at a total weight of 3.3E16 kg.
      • According to http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects, such a net of cell phones will create an impact of 1.16E9 megatons of TNT and create a crater 108 miles in diameter. It also notes that simliar sized nets of cell phones hit the earth about once every billion years.
      • The TROPOSPHERE is only 12 miles thick. The atmosphere goes quite a bit beyond that.

        Although you're right in the sense that it's the troposphere where the "weather" happens, so to speak.

  • Free phone, no contract required (Score:5, Funny)

    by Hamstaus ( 586402 ) on Saturday April 10, 2004 @02:10AM (#8823189) Homepage
    You know, I could really use a new phone. I think I've got some darts and a net around here somewhere...

  • ELF (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dysprosia ( 661648 ) on Saturday April 10, 2004 @02:10AM (#8823190)
    Even better, muck around with VLF/ELF radio. You can hear much more interesting stuff than just the sky, like whistlers from thunderstorms for starters...

    Check out vlf.it [www.vlf.it] for some interesting stuff on VLF/ELF radio.

    • Re:ELF (Score:3, Interesting)

      by nick0909 ( 721613 )
      You can do some cool stuff with low-frequency listening. I have heard radio skip that was transmitted on the east coast, bounced of a meteor storm [cox.net], and came back down to my little antenna in California. I also like the pings and zooms from various atmospheric disturbances. You don't even need a storm to do it, but that just adds to the randomness.

  • I'm confused (Score:5, Funny)

    by Aurelfell ( 520560 ) on Saturday April 10, 2004 @02:12AM (#8823195)
    Is April Fools Day the tenth of April in the UK?

  • I for one... (Score:1, Redundant)

    by iswm ( 727826 )
    Want to be there when they land; free cell phones for life!
    • NO NO NO!!!

      As was demonstrated in a previous post [slashdot.org] you CANNOT say "I for one" without mentioning the infamous Kent Brockman [wikipedia.org] newscast!

      To quote the aforementioned post:

      Here, I'll give you some examples:
      • I, for one, welcome our new knocking alien overlords.
      • I, for one, welcome our new colliding space debris overlords.
      • I, for one, welcome our repetitive slashdot joke overlords.

      There, now hopefully you will not make the same mistake. I have seen the light, I hope you have too.

  • Why cellphones? I mean, really, what's the value of having people call in to hear wind whistling around, balloons rustling (latex/plastic rubbing together), and cellphones ringing.

    Why not use higher-fidelity equipment, and make a recording available for download afterwards? I think the quality and value of that model would be much more attractive.

    Additionally, there will be issues with either 1) there being too few cellphones to meet the demand, and no one being able to get on them and listen, or 2) there will be too many cellphones, necessary to meed the demand, that will occupy all the access points/lines at the cell tower sites, and interfere with each other due to ambient RF from the phones being packed so close.

    I hope these folks are bright enough to have considered and addressed these issues.
    • Not only that, but with the recent /.-ing of this event, the interest in this project is bound to surpass the predicted turnout and might result in a complete flop for the majority of the people trying to connect to a very limited number of phones.
    • Cell phones are also optimized to only capture and playback sounds in the human vocal range. They weren't designed to carry any sound outside of that range... and may just discard it as noise.

    • Re:Are the real logisitics of this being considere (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Speaking of RF, they don't make clear *how* users are expected to hear these VLF phenomena, considering the GSM handsets popular in the UK are 1. digital (any interesting 'noise' becomes a bit error likely to be discarded from the stream), and 2. UHF/'microwave.'

      There's something absurdist and poetic about 'calling the sky,' but I do hope that a) there'll be a VLF radio onboard patched into said phones (erm, and the phones' own RF will indeed play hob with it, to the point it'd be unlikely to hear natural
    • If you're dissecting it this much, you're sort of missing the entire point of this.
    • I mean, really, what's the value of having people call in to hear wind whistling around, balloons rustling (latex/plastic rubbing together), and cellphones ringing.

      Maybe you should read the article first before commenting. It is not just the wind they are interested in. They also 'listen' to radio frequencies.

      From the article: Using mobile phones people will be able to listen to the actual sounds up high, the electromagnetic sounds of the sky as well as streams of "whistlers" and "spherics" (atmospheric
    • Oh come on, read the article. This whole thing is being done as a bit of *fun* combining some interesting science and a big art component. It's meant to appeal to people's sense of wonder and interest them, not to be the most technically adept way of providing a multi-channel audio feed from 60M up. If you had bothered to read the piece you would have seen that, apart from anything else the act of contacting one of the suspended phones is meant to change the RF field in the balloon cloud enough to change

  • Dude... (Score:5, Funny)

    by ctr2sprt ( 574731 ) on Saturday April 10, 2004 @02:16AM (#8823213)
    My hands are huge. They can touch anything but themselves... oh, wait.

    (Seriously, how high were the people behind this event when they thought of the idea?)

    • (Seriously, how high were the people behind this event when they thought of the idea?)

      RTFA, it says 60 meters up. Wow, the colours...

  • I want to call the phone... (Score:5, Funny)

    by John Courtland ( 585609 ) on Saturday April 10, 2004 @02:18AM (#8823224)
    ...that gets sucked into a jet engine...

  • It talks to me (Score:5, Funny)

    by Kohath ( 38547 ) on Saturday April 10, 2004 @02:24AM (#8823243)
    The sky talks to me all the time.

    It tells me to burn things.

  • This is art...not science... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Frennzy ( 730093 ) on Saturday April 10, 2004 @02:28AM (#8823261) Homepage
    just enjoy it for what it is. Don't you have an inner child that loves balloons? Add that inner child to your outer geek...and this should be good stuff. Come on, not everything has to be bad.

    (begin flame...NOW!)
    (no, I'm not a hippie...but I HAVE been to Burning Man, and am going back this year as well){
    • My inner child holds very dark thoughts of *popping* balloons, rather than sending them up in the air with phones tethered to them.

      No, wait, better yet, send them up in the air so my inner-child can shoot them down and watch the phone shrapnel scatter onto the onlookers.
  • ....I think you missed the April 1st submission deadline :-p

    -psy
  • But - it's slashdot so I should get a few made up answers.

    How do they answer the phones?

    And yes I started to read the article but was t/o/oo/wo lazy t/o/oo/wo click the More Details [haque.co.uk] link.

  • But personally... (Score:4, Funny)

    by josh glaser ( 748297 ) on Saturday April 10, 2004 @02:33AM (#8823277)
    I can't wait to see how many people mistake this for a UFO. ;-)

    • "It wasn't ball lighting or Venus, sir, that was a massive bunch of flying cellphones and balloons..."

      Yeah, right. Let the conspiracy theories abound!

    • Man, no doubt. A mass of glowing ballooons arranged in a hexagonal pattern, emitting a disturbing cacophany of cellphone ringtones? I started laughing uncontrollably right after clicking the link.
    • No! The joke is on you! Balloons, radio communications, patterns in the sky? How easily people are fooled by this so-called "art project." Wake up!
      • ...Sky Ear will launch at 7.00pm on May 4th, 2004 to coincide with the lunar eclipse...

      They're here, they're phoning home, and everyone thinks it's a bunch of silly Brits!

  • amazing (Score:4, Insightful)

    by JWSmythe ( 446288 ) <jwsmythe@nospam.jwsmythe.com> on Saturday April 10, 2004 @02:36AM (#8823282) Homepage Journal

    Well, there's an amazing waste of time and money. But hey, it's their money, not mine.

    I'm tempted to call for a minute or two, even if it's an international call. It'll break the monotony of office conversation.

    "Ya last night I called a cell phone in England, hanging from a balloon. What did you do?"

  • Oh! The sky sounds just like a busy signal.

  • Uh little problem... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by dj245 ( 732906 )
    Who will push the button on the cell phone to answer it?

    I know that we could use a midget, but if you're going to send up a midget, you may as well just send a weather balloon with a microphone. You never think your midget friends are useful until you actually need them :)

  • It would be interesting to hear the northern lights.

    If I whistle through the receiver we should get one hell of a show! :->
  • This is all well and good, but I would REALLY like to get a number... NOW (eh, I'm impatient).

    I for one welcome our new inevitable bad pickup line overlords.

    Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these.

    Okay... I'm geeked out. End transmission.
  • There's better use for this money than spending it on something that's so...useless. Not even news worthy too.
  • Think I'll set up a 900 number. For a buck, people can call me to hear me blow air into the microphone.

    I wonder if you'll be able to hear people shouting into the other phones. If some phones are close enough, it could turn into an impromptu conference call.
  • If you RTFA... the only discussion about phones is that people on the ground watching the ballon structure can use their mobile phones to hear what the ballon is hearing... since the whole structure will be teathered to the ground anyway, they could just be using a wired microphone with a really long extention cord to feed the phone system that everybody's going to be dialing into.

    Uhm... speakers on the ground might have been a cheaper idea to use...
  • Mkay...

    At least that was MY first thought when I saw this story.
  • Riiiiiiggggghhhhhhtttt.......

  • Cool, but... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Eric Smith ( 4379 ) * on Saturday April 10, 2004 @03:30AM (#8823425) Homepage Journal
    when will I be able to get a Smelloscope? I hope I don't have to wait until the year 3000!

  • And in other news.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by TribeDoktor ( 629092 ) on Saturday April 10, 2004 @03:32AM (#8823430)
    ... Greenwich, London had reported pellet gun sales going through the roof.
  • dumbest thing done in the history of mankind PERIOD

  • I hope they're not GSM phones... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 10, 2004 @08:08AM (#8824018)
    ...because if they are, the GSM circuitry will detect zero noise and therefore send zero signal to the receiving handset. The receiving handset will auto-generate a random noise which is perceived by our ears as silence.

    Thus, if you phone up these balloons, the sound you hear has been generated by the phone you are holding next to your ear!
  • This CELLPHONE event sponsored by AT&T, Sprint, Cingular, etc... (Skytel? Orange in UK?)

    Am I cynical, or does this just seem to be a way to get people to burn airtime? I mean, horrible sound
    quality (compared to dedicated microphones), fighting for a connection, it seems like this is
    even less useful than a bicycle with square wheels (in the real world, anyway).

    I imagine in addition to ringtones you'll hear a lot of tinny voices yelling "Hello!? Hello?!"
  • ...everyone knows that the wind cries Mary...
  • Oh no... "carbon fiber net structure"... "coloured blue, red and yellow lights"... can we please not have this one come back down to earth in Roswell?

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