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Sky Diamonds
Location: Earth (150 million km from Sun)
Date: 30th April 2015
Music: granite stone, 300 million years old

In this piece we experience the ‘sounds’ of whistlers as recorded in near-Earth space by the EMFISIS instrument on board NASA’s Van Allen Probe A spacecraft on 30th April 2015. Being recorded high above the Earth’s atmosphere these emissions are free from the cracks and pops of lightning spherics which are ever present in ground-based VLF recordings. At BAS we use wave measurements from the EMFISIS instrument in our global plasma wave models which are ultimately used to model and forecast space weather.

Alongside the ‘sounds’ of the whistlers we have a singular chord on the piano, sent through a 32 second reverberance. After that the original chord has been removed providing us with a disembodied soundscape for our sounds to resonate from. As the piece progresses we hear the sounds of a knife scraping the piano strings (please don’t do this at home), before a completely new instruments enters the piece, a 110kg piece of granite stone which has been polished and is bowed by a hand while water is poured on it (the water acts as a bow does for a violin). This rarely heard acoustic sound appears synthetic, yet it is natural. It is deeply arresting and is mesmeric when combined with spherics, whistlers and other space ‘sounds’ that occur in and around our Earth.

Artwork Inspirations: Energy, carbon, white heat, crystals, galaxy map blended as a discrete imagined object.

The track cover design is a layered digital collage created by Diana Scarborough. Source material is from /NASA/wikimedia
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Observable_universe_logarithmic_illustration.png By Unmismoobjetivo - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0.

credits

from Celestial Incantations, released June 21, 2021
Kim Cunio electroacoustics, granite stone slab, piano, reverberance, water sources
Diana Scarborough track artwork
Nigel Meredith science and 'sound' curation
VLF 'sounds' provided courtesy of NASA and The University of Iowa (space-audio.org)

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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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