Synthesizing the Sound of Space

Funded by 2021 DH@MSU Seed Grant

“Synthesizing the Sound of Space” is a pilot digital humanities project which aims to create a website, two podcast episodes (with an eventual goal of ten episodes), and an open-access sound production lesson plan. The website and podcasts will explore how the development of the silicon transistor has shaped the ways in which the sounds of space are recorded and created. The open-access lesson plan will walk users through creating their own sounds of space. This project will combine archival work, interviews, and sound production to appeal to those interested in the history of space, technology, and music/sound production.

This project takes its inspiration from two pivotal moments at the intersection of space exploration and synthesizing the sound of space: Mort Garson’s scoring of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969 and the NASA Perseverance Mars Rover recordings from 2021. While 52 years apart, and through much different methods, these two moments both relied on the transistor to capture or evoke the sound of space. In 1969, the silicon transistor was a relatively new invention. Mort Garson (Mother Earth’s Plantasia) created music that accompanied the Apollo 11 moon landing using a Moog synthesizer, a key component of which was the silicon transistor. Much of the writing around Garson’s Apollo 11 work has been limited to his obituaries[1] or articles about a recent reissue of his works[2]. In March 2021, a period when the silicon transistor was ubiquitous in our daily lives, NASA released the first audio recordings from Mars collected by microphones on the Perseverance Rover[3] to SoundCloud, a platform for uploading and sharing audio content. Here, the transistor was not only used in collecting the recording, but also by potential music composers through the digital manipulation/production of sounds.

Initial work on this project will focus on archival and online research, conducting interviews, and creating beta versions of the website and podcasts. The PI will focus on identifying key individuals in the history of the sounds of space, conducting video interviews with these individuals, and then editing/transcribing these interviews for use on the website to create a historical timeline of transistor development alongside a timeline of the ways that NASA (and potentially other space agencies) have collaborated with musicians or soundscape artists and platforms.

References

[1] https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Mort-Garson-Moog-synthesizer-artist-and-3231242.php

[2] https://daily.bandcamp.com/features/mort-garson-mother-earths-plantasia-music-for-patch-cord-productions-interview

[3] https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/rover/microphones/

Machine Learning

Find out more about my work on team science and machine learning here: http://www.stephanievasko.com/machinelearning