Langmuir Dispatches

from Sunconscious by Sounds of Space Project

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This track features Langmuir waves in the solar wind, detected by the Fields Experiment on the Parker Solar Probe. These waves are generated by beams of electrons which have typically been accelerated in solar flares. The sounds are utterly beguiling to a composer containing the interval of a minor second, the two notes that are closest in the schematics of western musical theory, a 1/12 representation of an octave.

The music has a significant story. Cunio travelled to the Australian island of St Helena in Queensland, named after the island to which Napoleon was banished. This island was a place of great suffering of the First People’s of Australia and also a number of convicts and settlers who were sentenced to work on the island who had previously engaged in various crimes.

The original well was found on this island and a microphone was lowered by approximately 40 feet. Cunio leant into the well (which was small in circumference and approximately 4 feet above ground level) and harmonic chanted into the well to record the chanting. This is combined with the sounds of chains and ruined stones that were recorded nearby as well as the sounds of the local waterway and birds. The vocal line was processed into an adaptive resonator that allows the main notes to generate a synthetic equivalent, which is the synthesiser like sounds we hear in the middle sections of the work.

The artwork by Scarborough is inspired by the Langmuir waves and the off-worldly dark sense in the music. Mostly a 'sky-scape', the dark mood in the image has touches of sunlight on what seems to be a remote land. Using paintings as backgrounds for digital art creation, they were blended, layered and, colour shifted, evoking the surreal mood in the music and the' sounds' of the Sun.

credits

from Sunconscious, released December 1, 2022
Kim Cunio harmonic chanting, field recording and audio processing
Diana Scarborough track artwork
Nigel Meredith science and 'sound' curation
'Sounds’ of the Langmuir waves courtesy of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory

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Sounds of Space Project Cambridge, UK

Sounds of Space Project is a collaboration with space weather research scientist Nigel Meredith (BAS), multimedia artist Diana Scarborough, and ANU Head of Music and composer Kim Cunio. Our projects emerge through a shared process of creative engagement and cross-disciplinary collaboration inspired by the 'sounds of space' from Earth to beyond the galaxy. ... more

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