Category Archives: Space Music

Events, Living in Space, Space Music

May 2nd concert includes ISS astronaut and Texas music students

A message from NASA:

Texas Music Students to Perform Live
with Space Station Astronaut

Expedition 39 commander Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, currently aboard the International Space Station, will make space-to-Earth musical connections with students in Texas this week to share and explore the relationship between the arts and space exploration.

Students from Pearl Hall Elementary in Pasadena, Texas, will perform songs with NASA astronaut Cady Coleman, Houston Symphony violinist Sergei Galperin and violinist Kenji Williams at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. From the space station, Wakata will perform a piece of the ancient Gagaku music with a Japanese reed instrument called a sho.

The live “Music in Space” program will be broadcast on NASA Television and webcasted on the DLiNfo Channel at 12:30 p.m. EDT Friday, May 2.

To attend the event at Johnson, media should contact Megan Sumner at 281-483-5111 or megan.c.sumner@nasa.gov.  Johnson Space Center is located at 2101 NASA Parkway, Houston.

This is the second “Music in Space” event. The first featured astronaut Chris Hadfield formerly of the Canadian Space Agency in March 2013. This event is a part of the Building Cultural Bridges program, which links Pearl Hall Elementary with Johnson Space Center and several arts organizations, providing opportunities for students to discover that they are an integral part of society at the local, state, national and international levels.

Linking students directly to space station astronauts provides them with an innovative experience of space exploration, scientific studies and the possibilities for future human space exploration.

These in-flight education events are part of a series with educational organizations in the United States to improve science, technology, engineering and mathematics teaching and learning. It is a component of NASA’s Digital Learning Network education program, which is designed to deliver interactive instruction in support of long-term retention of knowledge as only NASA can.

For NASA TV streaming video, schedules and downlink information, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/nasatv

To watch the Digital Learning Network webcast, visit: https://dln.nasa.gov

For information about NASA’s education programs, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/education

For information about the International Space Station, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/station

To follow Twitter updates from Wakata, visit: https://twitter.com/Astro_Wakata

To follow Twitter updates from Coleman, visit: https://twitter.com/Astro_Cady

Space Music, Space participation, Space Radio

The Space Project: More info + Two songs

Here’s an article about the Space Project  album mentioned here earlier: The Sounds of Space, in Indie Music – Science Friday

And here are two of the songs on the album:

Space Arts, Space Music

The Space Project: Space sound inspired songs from 14 different artists

Lefse Records will release the album Space Project  on April 18th. It is a collection of songs by 14 different artists who were challenged to use sounds transmitted from the Voyager spacecraft  as inspiration for their songs:

Last Thanksgiving, Matt Halverson, who runs the Portland-based label Lefse Records, was talking with his brother in law, Exogenesis President and Chief Scientist Sean Anklam, who described a trove of recordings the NASA-launched Voyager space probes had made in the outer solar system. Halverson, the Walter White to Anklam’s Hank Schrader, was overtaken by an idea: to commission imaginative artists to create songs and soundscapes out of the Voyager recordings. The interest among musicians—including , Spiritualized, Beach House, The Antlers, Mutual Benefit, Blues Control and others—was overwhelming. Lefse will release the resulting album, entitled Space Project, on April 19, Record Store Day. It will be available on vinyl, CD, and as a 7” box set.

The audio tracks that form the raw material for Space Project were recorded by the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes that NASA launched in 1977 and still uses to study the outer solar system. The satellites carry numerous instruments fine-tuned to record in different portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. The “sounds” recorded by the Voyager probes aren’t sounds in the conventional sense; rather, they are electromagnetic radiation fluctuations in the magnetosphere of the planets, moons and large asteroids the Voyager probes traveled near. Each celestial body is composed of different elements, has its own size and mass, and therefore sounds unique.

Jupiter:
A Porcelain Raft: “Giove”
B The Antlers: “Jupiter”

Miranda:
A Mutual Benefit: “Terraform”
B Anna Meredith: “Miranda”

Neptune:  
A The Spiritualized Mississippi Space Program: “Always Together With You (The Bridge Song)”
B The Holydrug Couple: “Amphitrites Lost”

Uranus:
A Youth Lagoon: “Worms”
B Blues Control: “Blues Danube”

Saturn:
A Beach House: “Saturn Song”
B Zomes: “Moonlet”

Earth:
A Absolutely Free: “EARTH I”
B Jesu: “Song of Earth”

Io:
A Benoit & Sergio: “Long Neglected Words”
B Larry Gus: “Sphere of Io (For Georg Cantor)”

For Canadian readers, the music can be heard now at First Play: The Space Project CBC Music.

TheSpaceProject_LefseRecords_b289720c

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Find lots of links to resources for “space sounds” and music inspired by them in the HobbySpace  Natural Space Music section.

Update April.17.14: Another article plus two songs from the album in this posting.

Space films and videos, Space Music

Music videos: Cosmos & Rocking Sun – Digital Stories Music

Dima Filippov at Digital Stories Music pointed me to two new videos with music from his album “Cosmos EP” on FutuRekords, which will be released on April 12th, i.e. Yuri’s Night.

Space Arts, Space Music, Space Radio

OPTICKS: Bouncing space art off the Moon

Leonard David reports on the OPTICKS project, which plans to beam artworks from the Humans in Space Art Contest to the Moon and back: To the Moon with an Artistic Bounce! – Coalition for Space Exploration.

OPTICKS is described as follows:

a project by Daniela de Paulis in collaboration with Jan van Muijlwijk and the CAMRAS team

OPTICKS is a live radio transmission performance between the Earth and the Moon during which images are sent to the Moon and back as radio signals. The project has been realized by visual artist Daniela de Paulis (IT/NL) in collaboration with Jan van Muijlwijk and the CAMRAS radio amateurs association based at Dwingeloo radio telescope (NL). Each live performance is made possible thanks to the collaboration of radio enthusiasts Howard Ling (UK), Bruce Halász (Brazil) and Daniel Gautschi (CH).

OPTICKS employes a technology called Earth-Moon-Earth or Moonbounce, developed shortly after WWII by the US Military as a form of reliable radio communication also used for espionage purposes. EME uses the Moon as a natural reflector for radio signals.

In October 2009 Daniela de Paulis and Jan van Muijlwijk started pioneering a new application of Moonbounce technology, called Visual Moonbounce, which allows sending images to the Moon and back, combining Radio Astronomy with amateur radio technologies.

The title OPTICKS is inspired by Newton’s discoveries of the light spectrum, reflection and refraction. Similarly, the colours composing an image – converted into radio signals – are bounced off the Moon (reflected and refracted) by its surface during each live performance.

The performance is introduced by live sounds of amateurs radio signals captured by the Dwingeloo antenna tracking the moon.

Here is a video of one of their performances from 2012: