Re: [microsound] Introduction [radio astronomy + experimental audio]

[derek holzer <derek@xxxxxxx>]

hi thomas

and welcome aboard! you are perhaps the only other member of the Society 
of Amateur Radio Astronomers [SARA] mailing list that i have ever seen 
post here :-) i recall some emails shot back and forth when i was 
considering a natural radio/field recording expedition to New Mexico. 
sadly, i never made it over to north amerika, and you had moved east 
anyway... still getting good reception???

this cross-over between experimental audio and radio astronomy seems a 
very fertile one. the Acoustic.Space.Lab project, based around a 32m 
fully steerable parabolic dish antenna in Latvia, got me started on my 
own explorations. and then, of course, there are the works of Joe 
Banks/Disinformation, Stephen McGreevey, Joyce Hinterding, and many 
others who have interested themselves in the electromagnetic emissions 
of planets and stars. like your Jupiter recordings, many of these works 
are somewhat more "documentary" than musical: they present largely 
unaltered field recordings of various natural phenomenon.

i am also very interested in ways in which the captured information of 
the radio observations can be left more-or-less intact, but can also be 
explored for various informational AND acoustic properties. one thing 
that immediately renders the recordings "useless" [scientifically] is 
the mp3 compression. a NZ/UK group called radioqualia just got awarded 
no small sum of cash to do a project with the dish in Latvia based on 
broadcasting "space sounds" over the internet. so far, however, their 
idea doesn't seem to take into account that anyone would want to 
reconstruct real observations from their broadcast. the lack of a 
universal time code and the fact that they hope to step down emissions 
from the Gigaherz range to an audible hiss of white noise ensures that 
their work will remain an arty curiosity [much like their "Radio Free 
Linux" project, which broadcasted text-to-speech conversions of the 
Linux source code], rather than a way in which other artists and 
scientists could actually gain remote access to this powerful tool.

interesting paradox, don't you think? trying to retain the real data 
contained in these radio recordings, while at the same time present them 
as artistic works. let me know your thoughts on this. and do keep us up 
to date on how your own investigations are coming!

best wishes,
derek
http://acoustic.space.re-lab.net/lab

 Thomas Ashcraft wrote:

>June 28, 2003
>
>
>Hello.  I just discovered this list and have been listening to some sound
>pieces at the microsound.org website. Pretty interesting.
>
>I do radio astronomy with an emphasis on audio recording. Check out 
>specimens on  my webpage at      www.heliotown.com
>
>None of the specimens there are artificial....just straight recordings.  I
>am now going to explore other recording technologies however because there
>are subtleties and  "microsounds" that I can hear in my recordings that I
>want to "tease out" so to speak from the raw recordings. 
>Also..."unpacking" dense jovian emissions is a goal.  Jupiter can burst in
>dense clusters of short bursts and I want to "hear" and study this sort of
>thing with greater clarity.
>
>For example : I want to explore aspects like synchrotron radiation
>phenomena spatially in multiple frequencies so as to get a spatial depth of
>field. 
>
>Then the next step is to translate the experience via the internet for
>common 2 eared humans like myself.   Reduction from raw recordings to lower
>resolution smaller sized files has been an obstruction..........Also, I am
>just beginning to learn about .mp3 compressions and such.
>
>Anyway, enough for the moment.
>
>Thomas Ashcraft
>
>
>
>
>
>
>---------------------------------------------------------------------
>To unsubscribe, e-mail: microsound-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>For additional commands, e-mail: microsound-help@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>website: http://www.microsound.org
>
>
>  
>

------------------------------