Some audio files for your commute…

Download the Airspeed interview with Jill Tarter to learn more about her work at SETI, the tools she uses and they ways we all can get involved in the search for extraterrestrial life.

Then check out this series of pieces of rhythmic entertainment from Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead. Using vibrations recorded by radio telescopes, these recordings are meant to connect the listener more closely with the universe.  A new piece goes up on the Grateful Dead site after every concert on their tour (where the pieces are debuted).  Thus far five recordings have been posted including “The Big Bang”, “Jupiter Magnetos” and “Cosmic Debris”.

Here is part of a note from Mickey on this work:

Part of the great power of rhythmic entrainment is that one is typically unconscious of the rhythms one most deeply entrains to, and unaware of all those that operate beyond the limited ability of our senses —voraciously scanning the rhythmscape with a variety of media— to detect. But these rhythms are with us all the time — in here and out there.

Modern technology allows us to capture or imagine them —electric, atomic, magnetic, galactic— and gives us a way to translate these vibrations into sounds which we can hear. Our radio telescopes have recorded the song of the pulsar, our mathematicians have modeled the domain of the Big Bang. The Black Hole in the center of the galaxy Perseus is singing a steady note -57 octaves below middle C. I have gathered together an unruly sonic zoo of 23 of these magnificent, even dangerous space creatures, and I will be introducing them to you, one a night, as we tour the Universe of Sound, the universe will start to sing.

Photo Credit: NASA, ESA, CXC, C. Ma, H. Ebeling, and E. Barrett
(University  of Hawaii/IfA), et al., and STScI

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 at 8:44 am and is filed under Jill Tarter's Wish Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.