Navigating the sounds of the cosmos

by 5:4

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29 comments

Terry Matthew September 13, 2012 • 00:11 - 00:11

Has the compiler responded to this in any form? The Google Sites page is a collection of broken images and it appears the Wiki page was subject to some kind of low intensity edit war.

5:4 September 13, 2012 • 11:08 - 11:08

No – but i didn’t expect or want a response from them.

Terry Matthew September 13, 2012 • 22:20 - 22:20

Understood. It appears that after your post, RazorEdits or whatever it is tried to get the Wiki page removed when all of these facts started being inserted into it. Or at least that’s my reading of the history.

Mick October 30, 2012 • 11:22 - 11:22

Would any of you know where to find the original data used for this material?

Being collected by NASA I suppose it would be freely available for research? I looked a bit around, as I thought someone surely would have documented this and discussed it seen in relation to history and media. The thing is, transposing or time stretching a set of frequencies in one way or another – be it from one frequency domain to another within the audible region or not, almost always yields “science fiction like” out of space sounds, and this in quite unpredictable ways – even if the source material is as benign as the exhaustion pipe of your car.

But I couldn’t find any articles on this anywhere.

5:4 November 12, 2012 • 11:20 - 11:20

Thanks for your comment Mick. i’ve never been able to locate the original data either, so i can only assume that NASA has withdrawn the primary source, which is a shame. i’m going to make contact with them to see if i can find out anything – if i do, i’ll let you know.

Rebecca September 21, 2016 • 06:31 - 06:31

Did you make any contact..? Sorry for gravedigging

Also, I’m curious to know if you could .rar these files up, for convinience

Haloxylon Ammodendron February 18, 2019 • 06:52 - 06:52
5:4 February 18, 2019 • 11:09 - 11:09

Unfortunately, those links have been dead since 2013. It’s possible to view some of the text via the Wayback Machine (https://web.archive.org/web/20150220171209/http://www-pw.physics.uiowa.edu/voyager/), but it doesn’t have an archive of the actual data.

Haloxylon Ammodendron February 19, 2019 • 04:07 - 04:07

Links are certainly good! I’m browsing through them right now:
http://www-pw.physics.uiowa.edu/voyager/data/VGPW_1001/EXTRAS/AUDIO/ — for Voyager I data;
http://www-pw.physics.uiowa.edu/voyager/data/VGPW_2001/EXTRAS/AUDIO/ — for Voyager II data.

5:4 February 19, 2019 • 10:34 - 10:34

Weird – they wouldn’t work for me yesterday at all. Well that’s great that the data is all available!

k February 26, 2013 • 09:26 - 09:26

I’m curious, I’ve been looking into these trying to find more info… Did you make contact? THanks!

Joseph Duffey July 10, 2014 • 05:14 - 05:14

Thanks for the great info and links!

unimaginably enough, every FLAC copy on the web of these now out of print cd’s has a 5 to 4 ratio break on disk 5… the files should be 31 min and are instead 25, apparently due to a corrupted wav. header.. disk 5 in the corrupted shows ~72MB..

5:4 July 14, 2014 • 12:19 - 12:19

Hi Joseph,

Rest assured disc 5 isn’t corrupted – it’s 91Mb and lasts the full 31 minutes and 8 seconds 🙂

TPT August 9, 2014 • 02:36 - 02:36

Thanks for this post with this incredibly hard to find info – this answered so many questions about these recordings for me. It’s been a nice introduction to your site, which is wonderful. I’ll also keep looking for that original data, and report back here if I ever find anything. Cheers.

5:4 August 28, 2014 • 19:09 - 19:09

Many thanks for the very kind words, TPT!

Muff Diver November 16, 2016 • 05:18 - 05:18

Thanks so much for these uploads and scans. As a previous poster mentioned, it’s so difficult to find these recordings anywhere, let alone finding them complete and uncorrupted.
You’ve made my entire month!

GeeSpace November 26, 2016 • 16:59 - 16:59

Hi,

thanks for providing this incredible stuff!
I tried to get the tracklists of the other compilations 1,3,4,5..but it seems hard to get.
Is it possible to provide it also here? Maybe as image..?
Thanks!

GeeSpace November 26, 2016 • 17:10 - 17:10

..or maybe providing the “*.cue”-Files to split the *.flac in several tracks would be very helpful..

5:4 November 26, 2016 • 17:59 - 17:59

Each disc contains just a single track.

SpaceDude April 5, 2017 • 00:20 - 00:20

Hey man, I’ve been searching all over the web for more info on this and there’s not much out there. Do you know anything about these recordings being in Public Domain? Also, have you seen “Symphonies of the Planets” as a download on iTunes, or streaming on Spotify under the name “Timothy Drake” I can’t find any info on that guy either… Trying to figure out the authenticity… Thanks for the .flac’s by the way! I’m a musician/audio engineer, and discovering this project has been awesome!

Daisy September 1, 2017 • 16:19 - 16:19

Hi,
I‘m from China,and I‘m just so happy to find these,but the thing is I can’t download them,they seems dead already. it would be sooooooo great if you can upgrade them!

5:4 September 4, 2017 • 11:01 - 11:01

Hi Daisy, the links are alive and well, so the problem must be at your end.

Michael Kepler June 17, 2018 • 12:23 - 12:23

I have the original run of 10 titles released in 1990, plus one of the Laser Light discs, and the way I read the liner notes, these are not a direct product of NASA, but something a guy named Dr. Jeffrey Thompson (Brain-Mind Research, subsequently Center for Neuroacoustic Research) made using Voyager probe telemetry data as source material. He doesn’t claim any sort of official partnership with NASA. He doesn’t reveal how he acquired the data, or in what form. He doesn’t provide a very robust explanation of how he translated the data into sound, nor reveal how much creative license he took in modifying the sounds. Certainly, the CD “Space Sounds Music” sounds like he took a pile of space noise and then used a bunch of notch filters centered on a traditional western musical scale to create a sort of “space organ”. Regardless of all this, most of these hours of dense noise are quite pleasant to my ears. An earlier post alleges some pitch shifting of the original data was done, but Dr. Thompson claims that there were electromagnetic waves picked up by the Voyagers which happened to correspond at least in part to the range of human hearing, and confesses to no pitch shifting. I could be wrong. I should go back and read the notes again. Thanks for the FLACs of the discs I didn’t have yet! Google Dr. Jeffrey Thompson and you’ll find he’s still selling the original 11 CDs (“Song of The Earth+ was put out under the newer company name in 1991), and a compilation disc, but nothing new in the space-probe-data-based arena. It’s all audio snake oil now, for all manner of afflictions and self improvements, but it probably sounds cool, too.

Haloxylon Ammodendron February 18, 2019 • 06:59 - 06:59

A complete collection of the original data formatted as mp3 audio can be found at http://www-pw.physics.uiowa.edu/voyager-audio.html

As posted here: https://www.discogs.com/user/VoyagerPWS

Haloxylon Ammodendron February 19, 2019 • 06:25 - 06:25

Wikipedia refers to this release in its article on Dark Ambient music:
“The Symphonies of the Planets series, a collection of works by Brain/Mind Research inspired by audible-frequency plasma waves recorded by the Voyager unmanned space probes, can also be considered an organic manifestation of dark ambient.”

Gore September 11, 2019 • 07:40 - 07:40

De cada uno de los trabajos de “Symphony of The Planets”, existe un tracklist? o son solo uno solo de 30 min, aproximadamente.

Gracias.

From each one of the “Symphony of the Planets” works, is there a tracklist? or they’re only one about a 30-minutes?

Thanks

5:4 September 11, 2019 • 09:57 - 09:57

Each of the Symphonies of the Planets discs is just a single track. You can see the details on Discogs.

Edward February 21, 2020 • 15:54 - 15:54

This is insightful. While I knew where he (RazorEye) got the recordings from. I did not have the patience to download and work the original files myself. So I downloaded his multiple versions (Grand Tour, Legacy, etc). Over time he began to switch up the names and sadly in 2013 I lost all of my music due to my XHD crashing save for what was on my iPod.

Here I am in 2020 trying in vain to find the original track names and times so I can re-rename what I have when I stumbled upon your site.

5:4 February 21, 2020 • 16:32 - 16:32

Thanks for this Edward. i seriously hope ‘RazorEye’ gave up his inept attempts at putting this stuff out many years ago. Now you know where to go to get the proper recordings!

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