Search - Various Artists, Voyager Recordings :: Symphonies Of The Planets 4

Sound In Space??

Thomas G. Sweetnam | Eugene, OR United States | 11/21/2001

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Originally released commercially as a five-CD set by Laserlight in 1992, these CDs sound like they came straight out of the imagination of Stanley Kubrick or Brian Eno's own sound studio.Yet there can be no sound in space, right? Wrong! In fact, there is all manner of racket going on out there, and a very strange ambiance it is to say the least. If one listens to the soundtracks on these CDs, recorded originally with special instrumentation by the Voyager space probes during their long interplanetary journeys through our solar system, they might understand where the inspiration for Brian Eno's "Apollo" soundtrack probably found its genesis. Everything from solar flares to the storms on Jupiter create magnetic pulse waves in space, and though these energy fields can't actually be "heard" as sound in space, they can be heard as sound back on earth when the recordings are remastered into the audible realm. In other words, if space had an atmosphere rather than being an almost pure vacuum, this is what the din of the interplanetary realm would sound like to us back here on earth. These CDs aren't for everyone, but for the audibly adventurous, there is a dark and primitive beauty to be appreciated in listening to the Voyager recordings, soundscapes billions of years in the making, transcending our meager ability of language to describe them."