Re: [rumori] re: curve of sound innovation


From: David Charles Dixon (dsquaredATeudoramail.com)
Date: Fri Mar 16 2001 - 14:37:19 PST


 
>What about music built around
>phenomena that nobody has been able to experience yet, like the sound of a
>collapsing star, or even the different atmospheric conditions of other
>planets?

Well, this has *kind* of been done already, by (Dr.) Fiorella Terenzi, who maps the electromagnetic frequencies emitted by various celestial phenomena onto audio frequencies, and releases CD's like "Music from the Galaxies". It's interesting for about five minutes. Quite popular with the Mondo 2000 crowd though, since it has a veneer of "science" (and probably also because Terenzi herself is easy on the eyes).

Which reminds me--and this is tangential to the subject but what the hell--of a particularly clever use of audio in a scientific experiment, done by the group of Seamus Davis at Berkeley a few years back, while trying to detect the AC Josephson effect in superfluid helium. Due to its quantum mechanical nature, if a pressure gradient is applied across a "weak link" (basically a membrane with a bunch of small holes in it), the superfluid will oscillate back and forth at a certain frequency, inducing voltage oscillations in a nearby detector. To see if it was working, they piped these voltage oscillations into a cheap Radio Shack speaker, and voila, heard a sine-wavy whistling noise.

So what's next, "Music from the Bose-Einstein Condensates"?

D^2

Join 18 million Eudora users by signing up for a free Eudora Web-Mail account at http://www.eudoramail.com
----------------------------------------------------
Rumori, the Detritus.net Discussion List
to unsubscribe, send mail to majordomoATdetritus.net
with "unsubscribe rumori" in the message body.
----------------------------------------------------
Rumori list archives & other information are at
http://detritus.net/contact/rumori
----------------------------------------------------



Home | Detrivores | Rhizome | Archive | Projects | Contact | Help | Text Index


[an error occurred while processing this directive] N© Detritus.net. Sharerights extended to all.