“In space, no one can hear you scream,” was the tagline of the first Alien movie. And that’s because there is no medium for sound to travel because space is a vacuum. Or is it?
Martin Archer is a space plasma physicist at the University of London currently working on an open innovation project to collect sounds from empty space, and he wants the crowd to help him with his endeavor.
According to Archer this commonly held perception about sound in space isn’t exactly true because space is never absolutely empty – there are always a few particles and sound waves zipping around.
In an article in The Conversation he writes about his work collecting these sound waves, which he does to see if it’s possible to predict why, where and when they occur. The research is important because it could help to forecast when our satellites might be in trouble – from space radiation called magnetosonic waves – and therefore give us time to put them into a safe mode.
However, Archer wants help to distinguish the different types of sounds out there in space.
So he has created a 6-minute soundtrack from a year’s worth of recordings from space and has uploaded them to SoundCloud. Anyone can take part in this open innovation initiative by listening to the recordings and leaving their comments.
“I just want you to pick out things you notice just by listening to them,” says Archer. “Are there really loud crashing bits?…Are there tones?”
For more information, watch the short video below.