About
Radio Astronomy is an art and science project which broadcasts sounds intercepted from space live on the internet and on the airwaves.
The project is a collaboration between r a d i o q u a l i a, and radio telescopes
located throughout the world. Together we are creating 'radio
astronomy' in the literal sense - a radio station devoted to
broadcasting audio from our cosmos.
Radio Astronomy has three parts:
- a sound installation
- a live on-air radio transmission
- a live online radio broadcast
Listeners will hear the acoustic output of radio telescopes live. The
content of the live transmission will depend on the objects being
observed by partner telescopes. On any given occasion listeners may
hear the planet Jupiter and its interaction with its moons, radiation
from the Sun, activity from far-off pulsars or other astronomical
phenomena.
Broadcasting Sounds from Space
Radio Astronomy correlates the processes associated
with broadcast radio - the transmission of audible information, and the
processes of radio astronomy - the observation and analysis of radiated
signals from planets, stars and other astrophysical objects. The work
synthesizes these two areas. The signals from planets and stars are
converted into audio and then broadcast on-line and on-air. The project
is a literal interpretation of the term, ³radio astronomy². It is a
radio station broadcasting audio from space.
r a d i o q u a l i a consider radio telescopes to be radio
receivers, which are listening to radio signals being transmitted from
planets and stars. Thinking of radio in this way radically enlarges the
concept. Radio Astronomy is located within this expanded field of radio.
Many of the sounds emitted by these objects are fascinating from both
an aesthetic and conceptual perspective, prompting comparisons with
avant-garde music and electronic sound art. Yet very few people have
heard these sounds, considering space to be silent, rather than the
rich acoustic environment it turns out to be.
Listening To Space
The weight of imagery associated with space is overwhelming. We can
all look at space, in pictures on television, in books, and on the
internet, but in popular culture, we have no sense of what sounds are
evident in space. In film, on television, and indeed in documentary,
space is usually depicted as an aural void. And indeed, most people
associate space with silence.
This is in fact a misnomer. A great percentage of our scientific
understanding of space has been derived by listening to space through
radio telescopes. The data we glean from listening to space is every
bit as significant and important to our comprehension of the Universe
as more traditionally understood optical observation.
Even the scientific perception of radio astronomy is largely visual.
Despite the fact that objects are observed and recorded using radio,
their emissions are represented using graphs, diagrams, graphic
visualisations and other visual media. Many objects, do however, emit
radiation in the audible band, making it possible to hear the Universe.
Space, as it turns out, is a very noisy place, with each planet, star,
nebula and cluster, containing its own sonic signature. And yet, very
few people have ever heard space. Hardly any of us could describe the
sound of a single planet or star.
Radio Astronomy is an attempt to address this, by publicly broadcasting sounds intercepted from radio telescopes. Radio Astronomy
enables listeners to tune into to different celestial frequencies,
hearing planets, stars, nebulae, and the constant hiss of cosmic noise.
It reveals the sonic character of objects in our galaxy, and in the
process perhaps make these phenomena more tangible and comprehensible.
The project is indeed radio astronomy in the strict sense - a radio
station devoted to broadcasting sounds from space.
What Does Space Sound Like?
By tuning in to different parts of the radio spectrum, many astronomical objects can be heard clearly and distinctly.
The complex interplay between the planet Jupiter and its volcanic moon,
Io, produces "radio noise storms", which can be heard on the radio band
from about 15 MHz up to 38 MHz. A storm can last from a few minutes to
several hours. Two distinctive types of bursts can be received by radio
astronomers during a storm. L-Bursts (long bursts of radiation) vary
slowly in intensity with time, lasting from a few seconds to several
tens of seconds and have bandwidths of a few MHz. L-Bursts sound like
ocean waves breaking up on a beach. S-Bursts (short bursts of
radiation) have durations of a few thousandths to a few hundredths of a
second and can occur at rates of tens of bursts per second. Groups of
S-Bursts sound like popcorn popping, or like a handful of pebbles
thrown onto a tin roof.
The Sun is also a very commonly heard object via radio astronomy. When
there is a solar flare on the Sun's surface, it is often accompanied by
a burst of radio energy projected into space. This energy can be
monitored with standard ShortWave and VHF radio receivers. Solar bursts
typically last from half a minute to a couple of minutes and often
sound like a rapid hissing noise followed by a gradual decrease back to
the original audio level.
Audio can also be used to describe more distant and abstract
phenomena in space. Pulsars are a good example. A pulsar is a small
spinning neutron star which contains an enormous amount of energy which
causes it to turn on its axis, or rotate, very rapidly. Pulsars rotate
between less than 1 time per second up to 642 times per second. It is
very difficult for us to understand the significance of this through
visual media. But audio or data sonification can really bring this to
life. For example the B0329+54 Pulsar rotates around 1.40 times per
second. Each rotation can be heard as a click, or a beat, and through
audio it sounds like a slow steady metronome. The Vela Pulsar, lies
near the centre of the Vela supernova remnant, which is the debris of
the explosion of a massive star about 10,000 years ago, rotates at
about 11 times per second, and thus has a much faster rhythm
The terrific amount of energy it takes to spin a star on its
axis at this pace, and the speed at which these rotations take place,
is more easily signified in audio, than in visual media.
Radio Astronomy is an attempt to depict some of these complex audio events.
Broadcasting The Music Of The Spheres
The history of 20th century avant-garde music and sound art has been
marked by the radical expansion of the notion of musique concréte.
Emanating originally from Pierre Schaeffer's experiments with natural
sounds recorded and played back in a musical context, musique concréte
has become a framework of thinking about musical forms created from
non-musical, or 'found', sounds. Parallel challenges to the definition
of music have been issued by many 20th century composers - Alvin
Lucier, John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis, to name but a
few. John Cage's iconic 4.33 challenged audiences to listen to their
ambient surrounds, taking into account the aesthetic and conceptual
qualities of the performance location. Stockhausen conceives of
technological tools such as microphones, transmitters and recording
devices as being musical instruments. These pioneering theoretical
positions have created a context whereby musicians are able to count
among their compositional tools and performative instruments most
naturally occurring or man-made sounds. What at first may appear to be
non-musical sound, can be heard and contextualised as musical by the
subtle intervention of a musician or sound artist.
Radio Astronomy can be interpreted as existing within
this avant-garde tradition. A musique concréte reading of the project
would depict the telescopes as grand concréte instruments, performing
an ongoing and automated composition, nuanced by the complex interplay
of the astronomers' target observations, the atmospheric conditions of
a particular period, and the operational condition of the telescopes.
Avant-garde contemporary electronic music can also give us
conceptual apparatus to examine the aesthetic output of the radio
telescopes utilised in Radio Astronomy.
Music created by experimental electronic musicians using laptop
computers and software such as Reactor, MaxMSP and PureData(PD) is
often characterised by its use of crackles, pops, hisses, ticks and
other digital detritus caused by the digital processing of audio. This
music, often referred to as 'glitch music' and exemplified by musicians
such as Oval, Kim Cascone, Ryoji Ikeda, Matmos, Fennesz and many
others, has become an important part of electronic culture. The
aestheticisation of the 'mistake' or 'glitch' which so exemplifies this
type of music has helped usher in a new appreciation of 'noise' and
'sonic artefacts' within music composition.
Read within this framework, Radio Astronomy
could be seen to be a rehabilitation of the poetic resonance behind
Renaissance astronomer Johannes Kepler's 'music of the spheres'.
Throughout Kepler's career, he focussed on reconciling Pythagorean
mysticism and the Ptolemaic system creating precise measurements of
planetary orbits. His third law of planetary motion, outlined in his
celebrated treatise, Harmonices Mundi (1619), related planetary
movements to musical scales and intervals. Though the 'music of the
spheres' is no longer an adequate explanation of the physical forces
which govern the machinations of the Universe, avant-garde music theory
could argue that the actual emissions of the astronomical objects
themselves are a new iteration of Keplers' 'music'.