From: LARRY KLAES (ljk4@msn.com)
Date: Fri Oct 25 2002 - 08:02:38 PDT
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From: JPLNews@jpl.nasa.gov
Sent: Friday, October 25, 2002 8:50 AM
To: News-Release-Recipients:
Subject: NASA Music Out Of This World
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Contacts: JPL/Guy Webster (818) 354-6278
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE October 24, 2002
NASA MUSIC OUT OF THIS WORLD
With scientific instruments on NASA's Voyagers, Galileo,
Cassini and more than two dozen other spacecraft, University of
Iowa physicist Dr. Don Gurnett has been recording waves that
course through the thin, electrically charged gas pervading the
near-vacuum of outer space.
Gurnett converted the recorded plasma waves into sounds,
much as a receiver turns radio waves into sound waves. "I've
got a cardboard box full of cassette tapes of sounds that I've
collected over nearly 40 years," he said.
Gurnett's tapes have inspired a 10-movement musical
composition called "Sun Rings." The Grammy-nominated Kronos
Quartet will premiere "Rings" at the University of Iowa's
Hancher Auditorium in Iowa City, Iowa, on Oct. 26.
Composer Terry Riley, selected for the project by Kronos'
artistic director, compiled an assortment of melody fragments
and ideas from the spacecraft recordings collected near
Jupiter, Venus and other planets. "It was a powerful experience
to listen to this material and realize it was coming from
millions of miles away," Riley said.
Riley listened carefully to some crackling and squealing
patterns from the magnetic field the Galileo spacecraft
discovered surrounding Jupiter's largest moon, Ganymede. "It
sounded to me like a voice saying, 'beebopterismo,' so that's
the starting point for one of the movements," he said.
"Beebopterismo" comes just before movements named "Planet Elf
Sindoori" and "Earth Whistlers," Riley said.
"Sun Rings" directly incorporates some recorded sounds
from Gurnett's scientific instruments into the live performance
and also uses string instruments to mimic and build upon those
elements. Riley added parts for a choir "to further emphasize
that this work is largely about humans as they reach out from
Earth to gain an awareness of their solar system neighborhood,"
he said.
The performance will be visual, as well as musical. Willie
Williams, who has designed multimedia shows for Rolling Stones
concerts and the Super Bowl, created a program of images to
accompany "Rings." Some of the imagery comes from the twin
Voyager spacecraft flybys of outer planets, including a video
clip of Jupiter rotating.
"You don't necessarily need to have a great depth of
scientific understanding to appreciate the beauty of these
images and the sense of wonderment," Williams said. "This has
turned into a much more contemplative piece than what I first
thought it was going to be."
The NASA Art Program contacted David Harrington, the
Kronos Quartet's artistic director, two years ago with a
proposal to create music inspired by Gurnett's research. NASA
and University of Iowa's Hancher Auditorium co-commissioned the
work. Part of NASA's mission is to inspire future explorers,
and the Art Program is one of many ways NASA reaches the
public. The Kronos Quartet has scheduled performances of "Sun
Rings" in 2003 in Houston, San Francisco, London and
California's Orange County.
Gurnett's instruments continue to examine plasma waves at
new frontiers of space. On Voyager 1, launched 25 years ago
and now farther from Earth than any other human-made object,
plasma detecting instruments are returning information about
the far reaches of the solar wind. Voyager 1 is expected to
eventually record waves at the boundary between the domain of
the Sun and true interstellar space. Cassini, with a radio and
plasma wave science instrument as part of a diverse suite of
instruments, will begin orbiting Saturn in July 2004. Galileo,
orbiting Jupiter since 1995, will use a plasma wave subsystem
in November to analyze the high-radiation environment closer to
the giant planet than the orbiter has ever previously ventured.
Samples of the type of sounds converted from plasma wave
instruments are available online at http://www-
pw.physics.uiowa.edu/~jrp/sounds/sounds.html . One from
Galileo's studies of Ganymede's magnetosphere is at
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo/ganymede/pws.html . One from
Voyager's passage through the bow shock of the solar wind
against Jupiter's magnetosphere is at
http://www-pw.physics.uiowa.edu/plasma-
wave/tutorial/voyager1/jupiter/bowshock/text.html .
One from Cassini, also of the interaction between the solar
wind and Jupiter's magnetosphere, is at
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/jupiterflyby/gallery/gl_pages/rpws_rele
ase5.html .
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages
the Voyager, Galileo and Cassini-Huygens missions for NASA's
Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. Cassini-Huygens is a
cooperative mission of NASA, the European Space Agency and the
Italian Space Agency. JPL is a division of the California
Institute of Technology, Pasadena.
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10/24/02 - GW
#2002-196
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