NASA Music Is 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.” The Grammy-nominated Kronos
Quartet will premiere “Rings” at the University of Iowa’s
Hancher Auditorium in Iowa City, Iowa on Saturday, Oct. 26.
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.
Riley listened carefully to some crackling and squealing
patterns from the magnetic field the Galileo spacecraft
discovered surrounding Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede. “It
sounded to me like a voice saying, ‘beebopterismo,’ so that’s
the starting point for one of the movements,” he said.
“Beebopterismo,” comes just before movements named “Planet
Elf Sindoori” and “Earth Whistlers,” Riley said.
“Sun Rings” directly incorporates some recorded sounds from
Gurnett’s scientific instruments into the live performance
and also uses string instruments to mimic and build upon
those elements. Riley added parts for a choir “to further
emphasize this work is largely about humans as they reach out
from Earth to gain an awareness of their solar system
neighborhood,” he said.
The performance will be visual as well as musical. Willie
Williams, who designed multimedia shows for Rolling Stones
concerts and the Super Bowl, created a program of images to
accompany “Rings.” Some of the imagery comes from the Voyager
spacecraft flybys of outer planets, including a video clip of
Jupiter rotating.
“You don’t necessarily need to have a great depth of
scientific understanding to appreciate the beauty of these
images and the sense of wonderment,” Williams said. “This has
turned into a much more contemplative piece than what I first
thought it was going to be.”
The NASA Art Program contacted David Harrington, the Kronos
Quartet’s artistic director, two years ago with a proposal to
create music inspired by Gurnett’s research. NASA and the
University of Iowa’s Hancher Auditorium co-commissioned the
work. Part of NASA’s mission is to inspire future explorers,
and the Art Program is one of many ways NASA reaches the
public. The Kronos Quartet has scheduled performances of “Sun
Rings” in 2003 in Houston, San Francisco, and London.
Gurnett’s instruments continue to examine plasma waves at new
frontiers of space. On Voyager 1, launched 25 years ago and
now farther from Earth than any other human-made object,
plasma detecting instruments are returning information about
the far reaches of the solar wind. Voyager 1 will eventually
record waves at the boundary between the Sun’s domain and
true interstellar space. Galileo, orbiting Jupiter since
1995, will use a plasma wave subsystem to analyze the high-
radiation environment closer to the giant planet than any
other previous orbiter.
Samples of sounds converted from plasma wave instruments are
available online from Galileo’s studies of Ganymede’s
magnetosphere:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo/ganymede/pws.html
Sound from Voyager’s passage through the bow shock of the
solar wind against Jupiter’s magnetosphere is at:
http://www-pw.physics.uiowa.edu/plasma-wave/tutorial/voyager1/jupiter/bowshock/text.html
Sound from Cassini of the interaction between the solar wind
and Jupiter’s magnetosphere is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/jupiterflyby/gallery/gl_pages/rpws_release5.html
The NASA Art Program has been commissioning artists to
document the Agency for over 40 years. It also supports art
projects designed to reach diverse communities across the
country. For more information about the NASA Art Program,
contact Bertram Ulrich, Curator, at 202/358-1713.
