Don Gurnett Selected Sounds of Space

This is a sampling of some of Professor Don Gurnett's favorite sounds of space. These sounds were recorded by University of Iowa instruments on a variety of spacecraft over the past 40 years and include audio samples provided to Terry Riley and the Kronos Quartet for their work Sun Rings.

More information about formats and system requirements is given below, after the table.



Description Audio Spectrogram Animation
Earth whistlers click for audio click for spectrogram click for Java animation
Earth multi-hop whistlers click for audio click for spectrogram click for Java animation
Earth proton whistlers click for audio click for spectrogram click for Java animation
Earth chorus click for audio click for spectrogram click for Java animation
Earth auroral kilometric radiation click for audio click for spectrogram click for Java animation
Jovian whistlers click for audio click for spectrogram click for Java animation
Jovian chorus click for audio click for spectrogram click for Java animation
Jovian electron cyclotron emissions click for audio click for spectrogram click for Java animation
Jovian bow shock click for audio click for spectrogram click for Java animation
Jovian upstream ion acoustic waves click for audio click for spectrogram click for Java animation
Cluster: Earth whistlers (stereo) click for audio click for spectrogram click for Java animation
Cluster: Earth AKR (stereo) click for audio click for spectrogram click for Java animation

Formats and System Requirements

The audio samples are provided in Microsoft WAV format, with modest bandwidth requirements.

Spectrogram images are provided in Portable Network Graphics PNG format.

The animations run a Java applet which requires a Java plugin for your browser. Unfortunately, the syntax for invoking such an applet varies between browsers and Java versions, but the markup we used appears to work for most current versions on common platforms. To get the current version of Java, uninstall any old versions of the JRE (Java Runtime Environment), and then install the current JRE.


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The Radio and Plasma Wave Group, Department of Physics & Astronomy, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.
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