Creating Music From The Sounds of Our Galaxy

Regular readers of our blog will know that we love science almost as much as we like music. Whether we’re seeing singing and dancing NASA interns or learning about earthquake music, we love it!

In late 2014, NASA released its vast sound library on SoundCloud that includes various noises from outer space to the ear-shattering sounds of liftoff to the historic communications that occurred from mission control—yes, “Houston, we have a problem” is included in the archive. 

Musicians have been having a field day with the free music samples including Davide Cairo and Giacomo Muzzacato.

They challenged themselves and their musician friends to create original music from these sounds. What resulted was a four-song EP that is now free to download. According to Rolling Stone: “The musicians were required to only use the NASA samples but could twist and contort them anyway they pleased. For instance, the noise of the Kepler space observatory spacecraft in orbit was turned into a powerful bass noise.”

We listened to the songs and were really impressed with the music. It’s definitely worth checking out.

Cairo and Muzzacato’s challenge also seems to have left an imprint with the friends.

“To me, the most fascinating thing about this project is working with something so unknown and far away,” wrote one of the contributors, who simply goes by JWCM. “The mystery of these sound’s origins really fascinates me; the time and distance they have traveled, the hidden messages that they might carry with them. All this makes these sounds really magical to me. Making music from the sounds of NASA was like creating color from black and white; taking these ‘noises’ and turning them into a language that speaks to us as emotional beings.”

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