Sounds of Space Project

ABOUT THE ALBUM

We invite you to turn your attention to space. Space is vast as we know. Here we have the opportunity to really think about what this vastness means to us as we listen. Let us imagine time and space in the grandest sense and go on a spectacular journey to hear our planet, our neighboring spatial bodies, the two giant planets in our solar system, interstellar space, a galactic pulsar, and the merger of two black holes as evidenced by the first observed gravitation wave, an almost unbelievable ripple in space time that Einstein doubted we could ever capture.

Space is a vacuum and utterly silent, with no capacity for the transmission of sound waves. In contrast, electromagnetic waves and gravitational waves can travel in the almost perfect vacuum of space, providing us with information on the astronomical objects within and beyond our solar system. In this album we primarily hear the ‘sounds’ of space through the conversion of electromagnetic waves and gravitational waves to sound waves.

Our journey in space and time starts on Earth with the sounds of ancient bubbles of air escaping from an Antarctic ice core, the same ice cores that measure the build-up of CO2 and...  more

credits

released June 21, 2021

This is a non-commercial album that is freely available for all. We would like to thank the institutions who have provided the audio data used in this project including the British Antarctic Survey, the University of Iowa, Jodrell Bank Observatory, the European Space Agency, NASA and the LIGO consortium. We would like to thank Dr Beatrix Schlarb-Ridley (BAS) who, as a promoter and supporter of our art-science collaboration, has been the catalyst for our 'sounds of space' project since 2016. Nigel Meredith would like to acknowledge funding from Natural Environment Research Council Highlight Topic grant NE/P10738X/1 (Rad-Sat), and the NERC grants NE/V00249X/1 (Sat-Risk) and NE/R016038/1.