3/19/12

Sounds in Space

The phenomenon of 'sound' is a product of human auditory/brain conversion of wave vibrations in the medium of air that make the eardrum vibrate and that is converted into brain 'noise'. Because the vacuum of space has no medium such as air or water to vibrate it does not have sound in that environment as we humans know it.

http://www.mediacollege.com/audio/01/sound-waves.html

The vacuum of space averages just one atom per 5 cubic meters of area in the Universe. It is almost empty except for various clumps in galaxies and solar systems, interstellar dust clouds and so forth. Space is very quiet by our standards.

Yet there are lots of waveforms in space (i.e. electromagnetic waves). I believe that almost any sort of waveform might be converted by technology into sound audible to human beings. N.A.S.A. and numerous others have made sound analogs of waveforms in space to form a 'soundscape' of what is out there.

http://www-pw.physics.uiowa.edu/space-audio/

http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/features/halloween_sounds.html

An example of how sounds might represent structures of signals or of wavelengths is Morse code. It is simple to give a sound representation of dots and dashes,long and short and so forth.

I have considered what sound 'atoms' might make recently though their occillations or vibrations are far too small to be noticed by human ears as particular elements...

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