Messier 51 (M51) is perhaps better known by its nickname, the Whirlpool Galaxy, because its face-on orientation to us highlights its winding spiral arms. This gives our telescopes a different perspective on a spiral galaxy similar to our Milky Way, whose structure we cannot observe directly since we’re inside it. The sonification tracks along a line emanating from the galaxy's core to the edge of the image and scanning clockwise. The light encountered by this line has been mapped to the notes of a melodic minor scale. The sequence represents ultraviolet data from NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer. 

The bright core, which harbors a supermassive black hole, produces a constant low hum punctuated by short sounds from compact bright sources within the galaxy. 

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

M51 Ultraviolet Sonification

Listen to the rhythms of the pulsating red giant star called 74 Draconis based on brightness measurements from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. Just below the surfaces of these stars, hot gas rises, cools, and then sinks, where it heats up again, much like a pan of boiling water on a hot stove. This motion produces waves of changing pressure – sound waves. The interaction of these waves results in orderly motion called standing waves that create measurable changes in the star’s brightness. Larger stars produce longer oscillations and thus have deeper tones. To produce audible tones, astronomers multiplied its oscillation frequency by 3 million times. (Credit: NASA/MIT/TESS and Ethan Kruse (USRA), M. Hon et al., 2021)

Red Giant Star 74 Draconis Pulsation

Integrated music and sound design for LIMBO (Playdead) released on Xbox LIVE arcade, Playstation Network, and Steam

»if you still have any friends that don’t think games can be works of art, they haven’t played this game.« (The Tanooki)

»Amazing, phenomenal, brilliant, fantastic, sublime, astonishing« are some of the adjectives used by reviewers to describe the audio in LIMBO

Martin Stig Andersen - Menu (Limbo)

Dead Melodies (UK) releases his Cryo Chamber debut with Legends of the Wood. A melancholic journey on the isle of mist. 

The hearth warms your bones as you peer out the crosshatch window. The damp morning dew forms translucent drops on the knee high grass. Whatever was out there last night seems gone but the birds are not yet singing and the animals still hiding. You pull your trekking boots on and head out the gnarled door, leaving the heat of the lonely cabin behind. 

Save the faint caw of a crow from up in the canopy, the forest lay silent; Devil's Hill looms in the distance. Through crooked trees you go as the headache hits you and flashes from last night come flooding back; Hooded figures. Blood. The sacrifice! Through clenched teeth you gaze down at the compass in your hand. The needle spinning faster and faster. Anxiously, you look back for the cabin, but it's gone. Gone! Devil's Hill dominates where it once stood, only one way to go. 

Lush field recordings, detailed soundscapes and melancholic melodies drench this album in atmosphere. For lovers of high fidelity dark ambient. 

Available in 24 bit FLAC on our bandcamp

Written, Produced, Performed - Tom Moore 
Artwork & Mastering - Simon Heath

Legends of the Wood

Bandcamp

Dead Melodies - Unearthed

Aphex Twin - 21 Forgotten T

Track taken from the upcoming album 'Hearts Must Change' released through Fluid Audio...

Audio: Kirill Mazhai
Mastering: Ian Hawgood
Design: Daniel Crossley

Mailing  list:

www.fluidaudio.bigcartel.com/mailing-list

Love Theme

Kirill Mazhai - Love Theme

DR-66 : Christopher Bissonnette - 'The Wine Dark Sea' CD / DL
due out on March, 13th
dronarivm.bandcamp.com

pre-orders start February 28th

The Wine Dark Sea is Bissonnette’s fifth solo studio album. The album’s title is derived from the writings of Homer, where he oft referred to a rough and stormy sea as “wine-dark”. Homer’s descriptions of colour are devoid of any reference to the colour blue. And any suggested meaning in his description of the sea point to the colour red. This apparent contradiction has brought much speculation about the significance and understanding of colour in ancient Greece. Keeping with the motif of colour, track titles on the album are based on references from contemporary artists and their insights on colour, form and implied meaning.

The album represents a shift for Bissonnette’s work, moving from an exclusively synth-based series of explorations to a hybrid of electronic and acoustic methods. The result is a rolling and slow-moving tide of tones and undulations. The textures are in some passages soft and mollifying but fluently shift to moments of tension and unease. The Wine Dark Sea is an aural allegory to sound and colour and our tenuous understanding of abstract meaning.

Mastered by Porya Hatami
Cover photo by Christopher Bissonnette

Buy CD / DL

CHRISTOPHER BISSONNETTE -  Color Deceives Continuously (from 'The Wine Dark Sea')

Lesa Listvy is back with their Second album on Cryo Chamber. An analogue heavy album with beautiful textures on warm subs.

Behold, the sacred coding of the lapsed Planeteers. They have committed their knowledge to musical intonations, to semblances of intellect in aural constructs, to the language of drones. The Saviour god-ship surface-to-air vessel has been encoded with several encrypted editions of the Preservation Directive. The divine loops of the source materials undergo their perpetual gyrations on the reel-to-reel of their venerable sound bursts. The Covenant of Analogues propels its drone-scripts, the hieroglyphs of the perished few, from the proto-dwellers of the Maxime Cataclysmus. They are the principal invocations of the forgotten, the diagnostic prophecies of the regeneration of the civilised world. The proto-dwellers have projected their immaculate permutations of the sacred message through rifts in time. But it cannot exist without being received by a conscious entity. The Saviour is a voice in the darkness that says: "Absorb our codices. We are the remnants of a lost species. Until you receive us, we are nothing."

Recommended for fans of Steam, Grit and Ghostly Ships flying through polluted skies

Unheard Of

Flying Ship

Credit: UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory

STEREO: Solar Winds Passing by NASA Satellites

Planck Sounds Of The Ancient Universe

Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO/K. Arcand, M. Russo & A. Santaguida

Chandra X-ray Observatory: Cassiopeia A Blast Wave High Energy

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.