You Are Living on a Giant Musical Instrument and This Is What It Sounds Like

These determine the pitch of the notes and the timbre, the character or quality of the sound, via the standing waves or resonances that are excited within the instrument as sound waves bounce around it. It’s elegantly simple, yet explains the rich variety of musical sounds that are possible.

The same is true within Earth’s protective magnetosphere, which is carved out by the solar wind. There are always a few sound waves – oscillations in pressure which travel through the medium that they’re in – travelling around in space.

Well, they aren’t exactly the same type of sound waves that we get on Earth. Space is filled with plasma rather than normal gas: a different state of matter made of charged particles which can generate and be affected by electric and magnetic fields. These kinds of interactions can give rise to the plasma-equivalent of sound waves: magnetosonic waves. These too are pressure waves, but with some added magnetism.

Such “magnetosonic” waves can bounce around within the magnetosphere and often set up “resonances”, where the frequency is just right so that these waves grow and grow in energy rather than fizzling out quickly.

Most musical instruments support just one type of resonance – be that the vibrations of a string such as in a guitar, surface waves on a membrane like on a drum, or sound within a cavity like in a flute. However, the magnetosphere has analogues of all three of these types of resonance going on at once.

The magnetosphere is almost always changing – it grows and shrinks in direct response to the ever fluctuating solar wind. One would imagine this should change the notes of the magnetosphere, given how a musical instrument works.

This is a topic I’ve been working on recently. The problem is that you can’t just listen to how the notes change because it’s often not possible to be sure what triggered the waves detected or what sort of resonance built up, simply because we don’t have satellites placed at all points throughout this “instrument” listening to these sounds.

We can’t actually hear these magnetosonic waves in space – the levels are far below the human hearing threshold. But satellites can pick up the sound and we can then amplify them and squash them in time to make them audible.

via GIPHY

These notes are hidden among the full set of space sounds I’ve posted online and now you can download the whole lot to do what you like with them. In fact, I’m inviting short films that incorporate these sounds in some creative way as part of a competition. This is your chance to play the strange magnetic musical instrument that you’ve unwittingly been living inside your whole life – whether you manage to produce divine melodies or not.