Hearing Voices from NPR®:
016 Bugs and Birds— For Summer Solstice
Host— Jeff Rice of Western Soundscape Archive
Airdates— 6/18/2008 - 6/25/2008

Jeff Rice of the Western Soundscape Archive hosts an hour of sounds for the start of Summer: an extinct woodpecker revives an Arkansas town, car alarms made from bird calls, breeding moths for their music, a morning walk with poet Jim Harrison, dancing with gnats, the seismic underground sounds of spiders, and the perspective of a pest controller. Stories by Long Haul Productions, M’Iou Zahner Ollswang, host Jeff Rice, and Scott Carrier; and recordings by Nina Katchadourian, Lang Elliot, and Dr. Rex Cocroft.

Produced with support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Bugs and Birds (53:00 mp3):

BBC Report: “Thinking up beautiful music.”

Musicians may soon be able to play instruments using just the power of the mind. Researchers at Goldsmiths, University of London have developed technology to translate thoughts into musical notes.

Soundwaves on fire, now if they could just turn it into a sound editor; a classic physics experiment, the “Ruben’s Tube:”

Hearing Voices from NPR®:
006 Radio Dial— Signals from the Sky
Host— Barrett Golding of Hearing Voices
Airdates— 4/9-16/2008

Radio stories about radio, then stories about radio stories: Jake Warga paints sound-portraits of “Urbana FM” in Uruguay and “Radio Gondor” in Ethiopia. ShortWaveMusic blog records “Duelling Transmitters” (also check his CD 30: A Retrospective 1976-2006). “WWV- The Tick” comes from Douglas Grant (voiced by former WWV announcer John Doyle). We premiere Chesty Morgan’s Forbidden Love!. Larry Massett interviews the “Language Removal Services.” Recordist Steve McGreevey captures the solar sounds of space weather, the northern lights, and “Natural Radio.” The Android Sisters lament the loss of great “Ray-Dee-Ohh.” And Scott Carrier reports to work for “The Friendly Man.”

Shortwave/music mixes from Myke Weiskopf’s CD 30: A Retrospective 1976-2006.

Radio Dial (54:00 mp3):

Singing Science Records is a collection of six records that illustrate science through song. They were produced in the 1950s and early 60s by Hy Zaret and Lou Singer; they were preformed by Tom Glazer, the 1940s folk musician who wrote “On top of Spaghetti.” Our Singing Science selections start with a song covered by They Might Be Giants:

Space Songs

• “Why Does The Sun Shine” (2:40 mp3)
• “Constellation Jig” (2:04 mp3)
• “Zoom A Little Zoom” (2:09 mp3)

Energy and Motion Songs

• “Engines” (1:14 mp3)
• “Kinetic and Potential Energy” (1:56 mp3)
• “Thumbnail Sketch of Atomic Energy” (1:39 mp3)

Nature Songs

• “What is an Insect” (2:40 mp3)
• “Song of the Rocks” (3:26 mp3)

For complete mp3 albums visit Singing Science Records and explore science in a fun and inventive way.

The idea of a nearly infinity-geared bicycle is a half-millennia old, first drawn by Da Vinci, and now realized by a couple San Diego designers: “The Ride” is one of Popular Science’s Best of What’s New 2007.

Saturn is one noisy celestial, and the Cassini orbiter and Huygens probe are catching it all. A/V from Saturn and its moons are housed in NASA’s Cassini-Huygens: Multimedia-Sounds exhibit. This audio is from the Cassini video “Sounds of Enceladus” (0:13 mp3):

NASA calls them “The Eerie, Bizarre Sounds of the Saturnian System,” as in this recording by Huygen’s microphones while “Speeding Through Titan’s Haze” (1:42 mp3):

The Cassini spacecraft is a multimedia reporter and has been snapping some astounding pix of Saturn:

A while back WFMU blogged (”Saturn, Your Other Home for Hippy Noise“) some Saturn-sonicities from NASA (1:14 mp3):

And the audio from this Titan descent mission- video, “Saturn Electrostatic Discharge” by The Planet Saturn (4:34 mp3)

“Sounds from a left speaker trace Huygens’ motion, with tones changing with rotational speed and the tilt of the parachute. There also are clicks that clock the rotational counter, as well as sounds for the probe’s heat shield hitting Titan’s atmosphere, parachute deployments, heat shield release, jettison of the camera cover and touchdown.

Sounds from a right speaker go with the Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer activity. There’s a continuous tone that represents the strength of Huygens’ signal to Cassini. Then there are 13 different chimes - one for each of instrument’s 13 different science parts - that keep time with flashing-white-dot exposure counters. During its descent, the Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer took 3,500 exposures.”

via SALT-y Rob.

A few of us HV types have been working on The DNA Files, along with an army of engineers, producers, journalists, and scientists. The series of five hours are now online and on-air. Lotsa work, lotsa science, and lotsa sound went into these SoundVision productions.