from Hacker News

The sound of Earth’s magnetic field

by cellover on 10/24/22, 2:03 PM with 18 comments

  • by aaroninsf on 10/24/22, 10:40 PM

    As a sound artist who specialized in actual field recordings, and took their honest representation and provenance seriously,

    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...

  • by ccbccccbbcccbb on 10/24/22, 6:16 PM

    As someone who writes electronic music and is pretty familiar with synths, effects and DSP in general, I call bullshit on the title of the article. It should read:

    "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.

  • by O__________O on 10/24/22, 5:57 PM

  • by pyinstallwoes on 10/24/22, 5:46 PM

    Instantly going into my next techno track.

  • by dylan604 on 10/24/22, 5:02 PM

    It's very reminiscent of underwater recordings where the flow is causing cables/chains/etc to move around on a ship wreck. Makes for interesting background noise. Will definitely be fun as a sound design for a movie.

  • by jamesdwilson on 10/24/22, 3:53 PM

    How does it demonstrate the fluctuation from the last 100k years? (per article)

  • by dhritzkiv on 10/24/22, 7:07 PM

    Sounds like a lot of sound effects from David Lynch's Twin Peaks: The Return

  • by m3kw9 on 10/24/22, 6:41 PM

    How is this different than saying here, this is the sound of light.

  • by sidcool on 10/24/22, 5:31 PM

    ELI5. What does it mean for magnetic field to have sound?