Name: High-Pitch Chirps and Earth’s Magnetic Harp by NASA
Duration: 3 s

One night while working on another track to honor a lost friend, emotions ran deep and the only way to cope with them was with what you hear on this track. Loop based track with live improvisation. Lament for D wherever he may be

Lament 4 D

Between Earth and the Sun, space is not truly empty but is filled with a soup of charged particles called plasma. This plasma comes from the Sun, pumped out in a steady stream called the solar wind and sporadically blasted away in explosive solar eruptions. When this solar plasma strikes Earth, it causes the magnetic field lines and plasma around Earth to vibrate like the plucked strings of a harp, producing ultralow-frequency waves.

In 2007, NASA launched five satellites to fly through Earth’s magnetic “harp” – its magnetosphere – as part of the THEMIS mission (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms). Since then, THEMIS has been gathering a bounty of information about plasma waves across Earth’s magnetosphere. 

The frequencies of the waves THEMIS measures are too low for our ears to hear, however. So a NASA citizen science project called HARP – or Heliophysics Audified: Resonances in Plasmas – has sped up the waves recorded by THEMIS to convert them to sound waves.

In this clip from June 10-11, 2009, whistle sounds are repeatedly heard over ambient background whooshes and crunches and a few high-pitch chirps. The whistles change in pitch as a THEMIS spacecraft moves toward and away from Earth on one orbit, with a maximum altitude of about 50,000 miles. These sounds are related to Earth’s magnetic harp, which has longer magnetic strings and lower pitches farther away from Earth. The high-pitch chirps are related to high-frequency plasma waves that are smaller than the harp waves yet can have an outsized impact on Earth’s radiation belts and space weather.

High-Pitch Chirps and Earth’s Magnetic Harp

Messier 104 (M104 for short), located about 28 million light-years from Earth, is one of the largest galaxies in the nearby Virgo cluster. As seen from Earth, the galaxy is angled nearly edge-on allowing a view of its bright core and spiral arms wrapped around it. Spitzer's infrared view of M104 shows a ring of dust circling the galaxy that pierces through the obscuring dust in Hubble’s optical light image. Spitzer also sees an otherwise hidden disk of stars within the dust ring. The Chandra X-ray image shows hot gas in the galaxy and point sources that are a mixture of objects within M104 as well as quasars in the background. The Chandra observations show that diffuse X-ray emission extends over 60,000 light years from the center of the M104. (The galaxy itself spans 50,000 light years across.) In sonifying these data, we can listen to each type of light either separately or together. Either option begins at the top and scans toward the bottom of the image. The brightness controls the volume and the pitch, meaning the brightest sources in the image are the loudest and highest frequencies. The data from the three telescopes are mapped to different types of sounds. The X-rays from Chandra sound like a synthesizer, Spitzer’s infrared data are strings, and optical light from Hubble has bell-like tones. The core of the galaxy, its dust lanes and spiral arms, and point-like X-ray sources are all audible features in the sonification of these data.

M104 Sonification

Days In Seoul | 서울에서의 일들 - Pt. 2

This week's haiku challenge: 


heaven and earth:
neither exists apart from
snow fluttering down 


Haiku by Kajiwara Hashin

Submission deadline: 19th March 2025

To find out more and participate, visit https://www.naviarrecords.com/haiku-music-challenge/

Heaven and Earth (Inner Horizon) (naviarhaiku584)

splintering moments

20250413-ambient

Enjoy this first listen from The Orb's upcoming brand-new album 'COW / Chill Out, World!' which is due October 14, 2016 on Kompakt.


COW / Chill Out, World!

out October 14

The Orb - 5th Dimensions

Chorus waves as heard by the EMFISIS instrument aboard NASA’s Van Allen Probes as it passed around Earth.

Credits: NASA/University of Iowa

Plasmawaves - Chorus

This recording is a laboratory reconstruction of the sounds heard by Huygens' microphones - the probe that entered the atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan. Several sound samples, taken at different times during the descent, are here combined together and give a realistic reproduction of what a traveller on board Huygens would have heard during one minute of the descent through Titan's atmosphere.
Credit: ESA/NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Speeding Through Titan's Haze

Space becomes “sonified” in this visualization of a cluster of galaxies imaged by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Time flows left to right, and the frequency of sound changes from bottom to top, ranging from 30 to 1,000 hertz. Objects near the bottom of the image produce lower notes, while those near the top produce higher ones. Most of the visible specks are galaxies housing countless stars. A few individual stars shine brightly in the foreground. Stars and compact galaxies create short, clear tones, while sprawling spiral galaxies emit longer notes that change pitch. The higher density of galaxies near the center of the image — the heart of this galaxy cluster, known as RXC J0142.9+4438 — results in a swell of mid-range tones halfway through the video. Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Camera 3 acquired this image on Aug. 13, 2018. Video: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/13061

Credit: NASA/Hubble/SYSTEM Sounds (Matt Russo/Andrew Santaguida)

Sonification of a Hubble Deep Space Image

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.

High-Pitch Chirps and Earth’s Magnetic Harp

NASA

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