Donald Savage
Headquarters, Washington                       October 24, 2002
(Phone: 202/358-1547)

Guy Webster
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 
(Phone: 818/354-6278)

RELEASE: 02-207

NASA MUSIC OUT OF THIS WORLD

     With detection instruments on NASA's Voyagers, Galileo, Cassini and 
more than two dozen other spacecraft, University of Iowa physicist Dr. Don 
Gurnett has been recording waves that course through the thin, electrically 
charged gas pervading the near-vacuum of outer space.

Gurnett converted the recorded plasma waves into sounds, much as a receiver 
turns radio waves into sound waves. "I've got a cardboard box full of 
cassette tapes of sounds that I've collected over nearly 40 years," he 
said.

Gurnett's tapes have inspired a 10-movement musical composition called "Sun 
Rings." The Grammy-nominated Kronos Quartet will premiere "Rings" at the 
University of Iowa's Hancher Auditorium in Iowa City, Iowa on Saturday, 
Oct. 26. 

Composer Terry Riley, selected for the project by Kronos' artistic 
director, compiled an assortment of melody fragments and ideas from the 
spacecraft recordings collected near Jupiter, Venus and other planets. "It 
was a powerful experience to listen to this material and realize it was 
coming from millions of miles away," Riley said.

Riley listened carefully to some crackling and squealing patterns from the 
magnetic field the Galileo spacecraft discovered surrounding Jupiter's 
largest moon, Ganymede. "It sounded to me like a voice saying, 
'beebopterismo,' so that's the starting point for one of the movements," he 
said.  "Beebopterismo," comes just before movements named "Planet Elf 
Sindoori" and "Earth Whistlers," Riley said.

"Sun Rings" directly incorporates some recorded sounds from Gurnett's 
scientific instruments into the live performance and also uses string 
instruments to mimic and build upon those elements. Riley added parts for a 
choir "to further emphasize this work is largely about humans as they reach 
out from Earth to gain an awareness of their solar system neighborhood," he 
said.

The performance will be visual as well as musical. Willie Williams, who 
designed multimedia shows for Rolling Stones concerts and the Super Bowl, 
created a program of images to accompany "Rings." Some of the imagery comes 
from the Voyager spacecraft flybys of outer planets, including a video clip 
of Jupiter rotating. 

"You don't necessarily need to have a great depth of scientific 
understanding to appreciate the beauty of these images and the sense of 
wonderment," Williams said. "This has turned into a much more contemplative 
piece than what I first thought it was going to be."

The NASA Art Program contacted David Harrington, the Kronos Quartet's 
artistic director, two years ago with a proposal to create music inspired 
by Gurnett's research. NASA and the University of Iowa's Hancher Auditorium 
co-commissioned the work. Part of NASA's mission is to inspire future 
explorers, and the Art Program is one of many ways NASA reaches the public. 
The Kronos Quartet has scheduled performances of "Sun Rings" in 2003 in 
Houston, San Francisco, and London. 

Gurnett's instruments continue to examine plasma waves at new frontiers of 
space. On Voyager 1, launched 25 years ago and now farther from Earth than 
any other human-made object, plasma detecting instruments are returning 
information about the far reaches of the solar wind. Voyager 1 will 
eventually record waves at the boundary between the Sun's domain and true 
interstellar space. Galileo, orbiting Jupiter since 1995, will use a plasma 
wave subsystem to analyze the high-radiation environment closer to the 
giant planet than any other previous orbiter.

Samples of sounds converted from plasma wave instruments are available 
online from Galileo's studies of Ganymede's magnetosphere: 
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo/ganymede/pws.html

Sound from Voyager's passage through the bow shock of the solar wind 
against Jupiter's magnetosphere is at:
http://www-pw.physics.uiowa.edu/plasma-
wave/tutorial/voyager1/jupiter/bowshock/text.html

Sound from Cassini of the interaction between the solar wind and Jupiter's 
magnetosphere is at: 
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/jupiterflyby/gallery/gl_pages/rpws_release5.html

The NASA Art Program has been commissioning artists to document the Agency 
for over 40 years. It also supports art projects designed to reach diverse 
communities across the country. For more information about the NASA Art 
Program, contact Bertram Ulrich, Curator, at 202/358-1713. 

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Voyager, 
Galileo and Cassini-Huygens missions for NASA's Office of Space Science, 
Washington. Cassini-Huygens is a cooperative mission of NASA, the European 
Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL is a division of the 
California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif.


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