The music-like sonifications sound a bit silly. By contrast, the black hole sound has been sonified based on the ‘actual sound waves discovered in data’ from Chandra. But where it does differ, is that usually NASA sonifies data in order to make it sound like something closer to traditional music (see, e.g. The black hole sound is not the only ‘sonification’ NASA has produced: more can be found here. The sound was also apparently ‘mixed with other data’ before being amplified – although I’m not really sure what that means. The audio produced was originally 57 octaves below middle C, which meant the frequency had to be raised ‘quadrillions’ of times to be heard by human ears. The viral audio, to be clear, is not a recording: it has been produced by ‘sonifying’ data taken from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (another space telescope). ‘The images from ,’ Goldschmidt wrote, ‘show the Universe not as we actually see it, but as we might hope to.’Īnd now, it seems, we are hearing space, exactly as we might hope to. As Pippa Goldschmidt has argued in ArtReview, NASA has historically manipulated the images their space telescopes have detected to fit the preconceptions of a public whose ideas about nature have been moulded by the romantic sublime. We know that there is a great deal of manipulation going on there: the visual data originally received by space telescopes is initially rendered in greyscale, which means that scientists have to choose what colours to paint it. If we ever were to discover intelligent life on some distant Earth-like planet, our messages would surely only reach them after global warming has reduced their world to a Venusian hell-scape, and also ours (so I guess like, 2024?).Īnd yet: we have long been used to seeing images of space, taken by space telescopes, that look, you know, space-y. The scale of space is not a human one: there are so many stars, so many galaxies, and they are so huge, and so far away, and anyway we’re not really seeing them, we are seeing the light from how they were, many millions or even billions of years in the past (if a black hole really did make this noise, it made it at around the time the first dinosaurs were around). No matter how much NASA explores space, we will never quite be able to grasp it. ‘Space’ is this sort of utterly transcendent thing, this thing which is supposed to make us feel how intensely small we are, this great beyond we can never truly understand. If ‘space’ had a soul, then the black hole sound is the music it would make.īut then I thought: you know, it’s odd. But more than anything else: the black hole sound sounds exactly like space. Personally, I think it sounds a bit like a Tim Hecker album I would quite like NASA to release a much longer version of the black hole sound, so I could work to it (Lo-fi black hole beats to study and relax to, perhaps). Or like a huge worm screaming, Jordan Peele’s new film Nope, and the music of Björk. While it’s usually thought that there is no sound in space, because space is a vacuum, this is not entirely true: a ‘galaxy cluster’, apparently (a group of galaxies bound closely together by gravity), ‘has so much gas that we’ve picked up actual sound’ – from a black hole at the centre of the Perseus galaxy cluster, 240 million light years away.Īnd really, what is notable about this sound is… that it sounds exactly like you would expect a black hole to. Last week, NASA went viral with what purported to be the sound of a black hole. Are NASA not just cynically manipulating some otherwise wholly unimpressive sound wave data, mining it for clicks and likes?
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