Writing and editing the last post about space ambiances, I stumbled upon some very nice space videos in YouTube I just feel to share. As you know, there are plenty of videos using and remixing the well known public NASA videos with all kinds of sounds and music.
And as creative and interesting they are, all of them sort of assume that “there is no sound in space”. I also thought was just a physical fact, as space being a void can’t transmit any sounds. I assumed that space sounds was pure science fiction and creative work by users and people fond of scifi-films and star wars stuff.
Outer space is void but not completely without sound
But now I discovered that there are some really serious science projects involving the “sounds of space”, which I thought did not exist. And, far more interesting, there is a whole YouTube channel devoted to it. It’s not an official channel, but an amateur work from one of the people involved in the project.
The project itself is called the Radio and Plasma Wave Research Group and works at the University of Iowa Department of Physics and Astronomy, led by Donald Gurnett. They study radio and plasma waves in space plasmas. The group has provided radio and plasma wave receivers for many space missions like Voyager or Cassini. One of their receivers entered the atmosphere of Jupiter along with the rest of the spacecraft. The group has recently developed an instrument for Juno, the Jupiter polar orbiter launched in 2011. They also are studying the Earth’s radiation belts, ionosphere, and thermosphere.
Space videos with “real” space sounds
The maintain a specific web page for space audio, where you can find some audio samples of “real” space sounds as well as some creative music and audio pieces from artists inspired by this. And there is their YouTube channel devoted to space audio, which contains a mix of scientific and creative work.
So I just created a playlist to share with your some very interesting audio samples and some creative work from other users, as this can be very inspiring for your own ambiances too. If you listen to these audio videos, you will find that the sounds we evoke as creative ambient mixer users are not that far away one could think of real space audio.
Have fun!
Check out the playlist here.
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