The sound of Earth’s magnetic field
esa.int
esa.int
it is a recurring gripe of mine when media relations and pop sci writers assert that this sort of thing is the "the sound of."
It is not remotely that. It is sonification, which is a fine and noble art in its own right,
but it represents an often very arbitrary transformation of one set of signals, into some audio form consumable by humans.
FTA for example:
"The team used data from ESA’s Swarm satellites, as well as other sources, and used these magnetic signals to manipulate and control a sonic representation of the core field."
Some correlation is there, no doubt—but it would be very helpful for people to be educated about what sonification is, and, what they are hearing in this particular effort, e.g. given a sense of scale and timescale and medium transformation...
"A whole bunch of synths and/or samplers, stereo panned and processed with a whole stack of effects, using a sped-up recording of Earth's magnetic field as a trigger of said generators".
This is not even remotely the sound of Earth's magnetic field.
(Generously assuming you're not just sh*tting on them for no reason.)
Even if you are not familiar with these methods, just think about it: even if soumeone would genuinely just bring the inaudible frequencies of a recording of magnetosphic waves into audible domain by speeding it up, without any processing, where would this lush stereo imaging come from? It would be plain and simply monophonic.
Moreover, they don't quite make it secret that this is not the actual sound of the magnetosphere:
>Musician and project supporter Klaus Nielsen, from the Technical University of Denmark, explains, “The team used data from ESA’s Swarm satellites, as well as other sources, and used these magnetic signals to manipulate and control a sonic representation of the core field.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llXu9pSvF54
I do realize though, that many people won't hear any difference.
https://soundcloud.com/esa/the-scary-sound-of-earths-magneti...
It’s art.
You would necessarily have to speed it up because we don't have 20,000 years to listen.
IIUC, they took a model of earth's magnetic field over the past 100,000 years, fed it into (some magic box that the article doesn't explain), and turned it into a public art exhibit.