Vibrations and how they get to your ears.
Noise for airports is a blog about culture, sound, music, and technology.
You can filter the posts to see just things I wrote or made.
Updated (sometimes) by Nick Seaver.
Totally gorgeous city maps wrapped around a barrel and used to play the piano. Up my alley, obviously.
(via information aesthetics)
“1945-1998” by Isao Hashimoto: CTBTO Preparatory Commission
Every nuclear explosion from 1945–1998, displayed on a map and sonified. It’s kind of transfixing. The beginning is a little slow (in a formal sense, not a “there should be more explosions” sense), but definitely click ahead to watch the cold war era intensification.
[Just returned from a vacation, blogging density increase imminent, maybe even rebooting my thesis posts.]
(via @protman)
Astronomers at the University of Sheffield have managed to record for the first time the eerie musical harmonies produced by the magnetic field in the outer atmosphere of the sun. They found that huge magnetic loops that have been observed coiling away from the outer layer of the sun’s atmosphere, known as coronal loops, vibrate like strings on a musical instrument.
In other cases they behave more like soundwaves as they travel through a wind instrument. Using satellite images of these loops, which can be over 60,000 miles long, the scientists were able to recreate the sound by turning the visible vibrations into noises and speeding up the frequency so it is audible to the human ear.
(via Telegraph)
This interactive data sonification feature from the New York Times is fantastic. It is a perfect case for the usefulness of sonification: hearing the close finishes of the Olympic races really gives you a better sense of just how close they are, even compared to watching them!
This is the sound of a Mars rover, sort of. There are no microphones on the rovers (why not?!), but this is the data from their accelerometers, sped up until it is in the audible range, about 1000x. That means that in the full hour-long file you can get of rover Opportunity at NASA’s site is actually 2143 Martian days long! (That’s Jan. 24, 2004 to Feb. 2, 2010 on Earth.)
(via NASA)
Nathalie Miebach is a sculptor who makes “sculptural musical scores” based on weather data. If that sounds confusing, imagine how you might play the sculpture pictured above. Apparently the process goes: gather weather data, make into score that looks like this, and then make either a sculpture or music from it. She’s got a lot of pictures of her sculptures on her website.
(I like how “data” is in her list of media for the sculptures.)
This is an interesting idea (although the video does seem to drag after a while): use some sort of magic microphones to capture the sounds (and I think magnetic interference) of a computer in operation.
A great idea with a sort of middling execution: taking stellar data and using it to generate a musical clock. A Wheel of Stars.
It seems like the data could produce something much more vibrant than this.
(via Califaudio)
update: blast! scooped by boingboing (and they love it!). That’s what I get for queueing up posts.
