European Research Network GÉANT Turns Spacecraft Data Into Music 33
New submitter samshead writes in with a bit of interesting news from GÉANT (the European research network): "GÉANT ... recently demonstrated its power by sonifying 36 years’ worth of NASA Voyager spacecraft data and converting it into a musical duet. ... To compose the spacecraft duet, 320,000 measurements were first selected from each spacecraft, at one hour intervals. Then that data was converted into two very long melodies, each comprising 320,000 notes using different sampling frequencies ... The result of the conversion into waveform, using such a big dataset, created a wide collection of audible sounds, lasting just a few seconds (slightly more than 7 seconds at 44.1kHz) to a few hours (more than 5hours using 1024Hz as a sampling frequency). A certain number of data points, from a few thousand to 44,100 were each 'converted' into 1 second of sound."
Listen to the song (it plays using HTML5 audio if you pretend to be an iPhone, otherwise it requires Flash).
Predictions (Score:4, Funny)
Five things will happen because of this:
1. Someone will publish it to Youtube and it will promptly be blocked because of some automated cease and desist that algorithmically determined that there was a set of two notes that, if piped through a cat being boiled, then fed through a synthesizer and finally broadcast over shortwave halfway around the world, might vaguely resemble their copyrighted work. If you were drunk.
2. Someone will (correctly) observe that it has more artistic value than the last couple of One Direction albums.
3. Someone will comment on how it's an epic waste of tax dollars, and demand to know what possible value the entire field of science and technology has. They will do this using a computer, sitting in a temperature controlled building, connected to a power grid, which has CNN streaming on TV in the background through a satellite. They will not see the irony.