For World Oceans Month, enjoy a moment of zen with a symphonic tour of the ocean. Experience the swirls off the coast of Río de la Plata to the upwellings in the Indian Ocean put to musical notes of imagery from our own Earth-observing satellites.

Sounds of the Sea

Blazars are galaxies whose central supermassive black hole, weighing millions to billions of times our Sun’s mass, blasts a particle jet almost directly toward us at nearly the speed of light.

This track sonifies a decade of gamma rays from the blazar TXS 0506+056 detected by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope between August 2008 and May 2018. The percussive sounds match the energy of the detected gamma rays. Unprecedented flaring activity began in April 2017 and continued for months. On Sept. 22, 2017, an observatory at the South Pole detected a high-energy neutrino thought to have originated from the blazar. Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration., Matt Russo and Andrew Santaguida/SYSTEM Sounds

Blazar Flare Sonification

The core of our Milky Way galaxy is densely packed with gas, dust, stars, and stellar remnants, but its centerpiece is a monster black hole with a mass of 4 million Suns called Sagittarius A* (pronounced “A-star”).

This sonification tracks an image of the galactic center captured by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, Hubble Space Telescope, and Spitzer Space Telescope in X-ray, optical, and infrared light, respectively. A different instrument represents each observatory, with a xylophone for Chandra, a violin for Hubble and a soft piano for Spitzer. The translation begins on the left side of the image and moves to the right, with sounds representing the positions and brightness of the sources. The light of objects located toward the top of the image have higher pitch, while the intensity of the light controls the volume. Stars and compact sources emerge as individual notes, while extended clouds of gas and dust produce an evolving drone. A crescendo happens in the brightest region of the image, where the supermassive black hole resides. The Hubble image outlines energetic regions where stars are being born, while Spitzer’s infrared data show glowing clouds of dust containing complex structures. X-rays from Chandra reveal gas heated to millions of degrees from stellar explosions and outflows from Sagittarius A*. 

Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: NASA/STScI; IR: Spitzer NASA/JPL-Caltech; Sonification: NASA/CXC/SAO/Kimberly Arcand, SYSTEM Sounds (Matt Russo, Andrew Santaguida)

Galactic Center Sonification

The core of our Milky Way galaxy is densely packed with gas, dust, stars, and stellar remnants, but its centerpiece is a monster black hole with a mass of 4 million Suns called Sagittarius A* (pronounced “A-star”). This sonification tracks an image of the galactic center captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in optical light.

The translation begins on the left side of the image and moves to the right, with sounds representing the positions and brightness of the sources. The light of objects located toward the top of the image take on higher pitches, while their brightness controls the volume. Hubble’s view of the galactic center outlines energetic regions where stars are being born. 

Credit: Optical: NASA/STScI; Sonification: NASA/CXC/SAO/Kimberly Arcand, SYSTEM Sounds (Matt Russo, Andrew Santaguida)

Galactic Center Optical Light Sonification

The core of our Milky Way galaxy is densely packed with gas, dust, stars and stellar remnants, but its centerpiece is a monster black hole with a mass of 4 million Suns called Sagittarius A* (pronounced “A-star”). This sonification tracks an image of the galactic center captured by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.

The translation begins on the left side of the image and moves to the right, with sounds representing the positions and brightness of the sources. Objects located toward the top of the image play as higher pitches, while their brightness determines the volume. X-rays seen by Chandra reveal gas heated to millions of degrees from stellar explosions and outflows from Sagittarius A*. 

Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Sonification: NASA/CXC/SAO/Kimberly Arcand, SYSTEM Sounds (Matt Russo, Andrew Santaguida)

Galactic Center X-ray Sonification

Hear radio emissions collected during the Juno spacecraft’s June 7, 2021, flyby of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/Univ of Iowa

Audio of Juno’s Ganymede Flyby

Audio recording of the Doppler shift in the high-frequency radio signals received from Mars Express by Bertrand Pinel, 29 December 2013, in his garden near Castelnaudary, France. Credit & Copyright (C) B. Pinel. Used by permission. Details via ESA's Mars Express blog http://wp.me/p2E5wN-aU

Mars Express flies by Phobos 29 Dec 2013

This composition was created using spectral ocean reflectance data, extracted from a series of rolling 32-day average global composites from MODIS-Aqua. The averages are computed every 8-days, making for 48 images per year. The actual data that are extracted represent the mean of a 10x10 box of 9 km2 resolution data (which equals a box of 8,100 km2), in order to help fill in gaps that may arise from cloud cover throughout the year. The center location of that 10x10 box is -16.625o, 153.292o.
 
Credit: Image from MODIS, onboard NASA’s Aqua satellite. Sonification: Jon Vandermeulen and Ryan Vandermeulen. Image credit: Ryan Vandermeulen.

Coral Sea Sonification

This is a frozen moment in time - a transect across a beautiful swirling eddy off the coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Western Bering Sea, as seen from space. The melody corresponds directly to the intensity of red (Rrs-667), green (Rrs-547), and blue (Rrs-443) spectral ocean reflectance data, as detected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) onboard the Aqua satellite. 

Listen closely as the colors harmonize and diverge, manifesting the natural patterns created by microscopic life in the ocean.
 
Credit: Image from MODIS, onboard NASA’s Aqua satellite. Sonification: Jon Vandermeulen and Ryan Vandermeulen.  Image credit: Norman Kuring.

Bering Sea Eddy Sonification

A NASA satellite image reveals the beauty created when a big river meets an even bigger ocean outside the Rio de la Plata. We represent this beauty in the form of music, by mathematically translating hidden layers of “ocean color” reflectance data across a transect outbound from the large estuary. The patterns you hear in the music are the same patterns that enable scientists to unravel the microscopic composition of the ocean from space.
 
The song is the same data set repeated four times. In each repetition, a different color takes center stage and performs a solo of sorts while the other colors provide background. In the first part, blue light (Rrs-443 and Rrs-469) rapidly pick an acoustic guitar, while green light (harp) and red light (bass) provide a rhythmic backing. In the second part, blue takes a back seat and red (Rrs-667) takes its turn thumping out a bass solo. In the third part, green light (Rrs-547 and Rrs-555) shines. The result is a semi-subjective interpretation of objective data.

Rio De La Plata Sonification

A series of relatively cloud-free images over Northwest Australia was captured by the Visual Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), from August 1-31, 2016. The music you hear directly represents the day-to-day variations in the intensity of 5 visible-range spectral reflectance (Rrs) channels, extracted from a specific location (-13.359o, 120.984o) over the course of this time series.
  
Credit: Image from VIIRS, onboard Suomi-NPP satellite. Sonification: Jon Vandermeulen and Ryan Vandermeulen. Image credit: Ryan Vandermeulen.

Indian Ocean Sonification

A subwoofer or earphones are needed to hear this clip. Listen to raw, unprocessed data from the seismometer on NASA's InSight spacecraft of vibrations caused by wind moving over the solar panels on Mars. The sounds were recorded by two of the three short-period sensors on the seismometer (SEIS). 
 
JPL manages InSight for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. InSight is part of NASA's Discovery Program, managed by the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
 
France’s national space agency, Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES), Paris, leads the consortium that provided SEIS. The principal investigator for SEIS is Philippe Lognonné of the Institute of Earth Physics of Paris (Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, or IPGP). Imperial College, London, and Oxford University made the short-period sensors.
 
For more information on the InSight mission, visit https://mars.nasa.gov/insight
 
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/CNES/UKSA/Imperial College London/Oxford/ETH

Raw Sounds from InSight's Seismometer on Mars (full length)

Hello, we’re NASA. You may have seen our astronauts, rocket launches, or Mars rovers — but have you heard our sounds? From interviews with astronauts and engineers to stories that take you on a tour of the galaxy, NASA’s audio offerings let you experience the thrill of space exploration without ever leaving Earth.

Bering Sea Eddy Sonification

NASA

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