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...
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.
I hear what they did. There are distinct generators placed in various places in the sound stage, with reverbs on them, with sound that is characteristic of granular synthesis.
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.
My interpretation of the text was that the stereo imaging came from the different locations on the Earth, so some left to right mapping by longitude maybe?
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.
One simple answer is that electricity run through a loudspeaker makes sound. And physics tells us that changing magnetic fields cause electricity. You could run that electricity through a speaker and "hear" the Earth's changing magnetic field.
You would necessarily have to speed it up because we don't have 20,000 years to listen.
IMHO the 2nd sentence is still pretty vague and maybe misleading.
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.
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...