The Sounds of the Planets

I’ll put this under “Science & Tech” rather than “Entertainment” since the actual sounds themselves are of questionable entertainment value.

In 1992 NASA released some recordings of sped up auroral electron deflections around the magnetic fields of planets, and slowed down solar wind, and other non-sound measurements transposed to the audio frequencies.

Supposedly.

They sound an awful lot, to me, like somebody faking such measurements using synthesizer equipment.  But I can find no admissions of guilt online about these recordings being something other than how they’re described.

You know me.  I’m a sucker for oddball recordings, and these certainly qualify.  But are they real?  Who knows.

NASA wrote:

Although space is a virtual vacuum, this does not mean there is no sound in space. Sound does exist in electronic vibrations. The specially designed instruments on board the Voyagers performed special experiments to pick up and record these vibrations, all within the range of human hearing. Hear the beautful songs of the planets. The complex interactions of the cosmic plasma of the universe, charged electromagnetic particles from the solar wind, planetary magnetosphere, rings and moons create vibration "soundscapes" which are at once utterly alien and deeply familiar to the human ear. Some of these sounds are hauntingly like human voices singing, giant Tibetan bowls, wind, waves, birds and dolphins.

Quote :

The creation of "planetary sound" started when the Voyager 2 spacecraft swept past Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus from 1979-89 The probe picked up electromagnetic disturbances and charged particle fluxes, not actual sound. Charged particles (either bouncing off the planets from the Sun or produced by the planets themselves) travel in the space, usually kept in check by the planets' magnetospheres. Also, radio waves (again either reflected waves or produced by processes on the planets themselves) get trapped by the immense strength of a planet's magnetic field. The electromagnetic waves and charged particles were measured by the probe and the data from those measurements were then sent back to Earth for analysis.

One interesting example was the so-called "Saturn kilometric radiation". It's a low-frequency radio emission, so it's actually lower than we can hear. It is produced as electrons move along magnetic field lines, and they're somehow related to auroral activity at the poles. At the time of the Voyager 2 flyby of Saturn, the scientists working with the planetary radio astronomy instrument detected this radiation, speeded it up and made a "song" that people could hear.

In the Voyager 2 data, none of the measurements themselves were of actual sound waves. However, many of the electromagnetic wave and particle oscillation frequencies could be translated into sound in the same way that our personal music players take data and turn it into sound. All NASA had to do was to take the data accumulated by the ​Voyager probe and convert it into sound waves. That's where the "songs" of distant planets originate; as data from a spacecraft.

Huh.

I was just reading an article about the "dark ambient" music genre -- long story -- and the NASA recordings are mentioned as precursors of this style. Huh. I guess that could be.

Would not have made that connection on my own.