universum tonal – .init

This is the very first entry in the blog for an project currently called “Universum Tonal”. This repository is an experiment to document the development of a concept album with music made from the sounds of the universe. The goal is to extract the radio waves of certain celestial objects convert them into sounds, wave tables and samples which will be used in samplers, mixers and synthesizers to create an eight-track album.

The experiment

This project will take a long time to be completed. The final milestone will be the eight-track album but with a lot of steps in between. I’d like to understand the stuff I create and work with therefore I am going to write several essays over the course of this experiment. They’ll contain information about all the stuff happening behind the scenes like understanding radio waves, converting the data, displaying and explaining the data and how I developed my results. For that I want to implement a small ruleset:

• No pressue – No one expects something happening within the next two or three years
• use RAW data – I don’t want to use precompiled data. I want the raw stuff
• Document everything – Whenever something is happening with this project, from thought to essay, document it
• Open* – everything in this project is open source and can be used and manipulated by others, free and forever

As the project, this repository will grow and change over time. I don’t know what yet but I’ll decide how to change stuff here when the needs are present. For now I am happy with the .md files.

What I’ve done so far

Nothing basically. Currently I am thinking a lot about this project and how I want to approach things. There has been a huge inspiration boost lately because I found the raw data of a lot of instruments on different satellites like Juno or Cassini – even older missions like Mariner 10. The project is called Planetary Data System and I am so excited to browse through all the information and data.

What’s next?

There is a lot of stuff to do. I really don’t have an overview yet of what to learn and research. So I am going to get that at first, like identifing the concrete goals, what the “endproduct” should look like, research the data I need, learn how to convert everything, writing about all of that and so on. So, I am taking my time to get an overview of my topic first and then I define the next steps.