News

Music Out of This World

With detection instruments on NASA's Voyagers, Galileo, Cassini and more than two dozen other spacecraft, University of Iowa physicist Dr. Don Gurnett has been recording waves that course through the thin, electrically-charged gas pervading the near-vacuum of outer space.

Gurnett converted the recorded plasma waves into sounds, much as a receiver turns radio waves into sound waves. "I've got a cardboard box full of cassette tapes of sounds that I've collected over nearly 40 years," he said.

Gurnett's tapes have inspired a 10-movement musical composition called "Sun Rings" commisioned by the Grammy-nominated Kronos Quartet who will premiere "Rings". Composer Terry Riley, selected for the project by Kronos' artistic director, compiled an assortment of melody fragments and ideas from the spacecraft recordings collected near Jupiter, Venus and other planets. "It was a powerful experience to listen to this material and realize it was coming from millions of miles away" Riley said.

Read more on NASA's Webpages...