By Blake Marie Bullock

Shattering the confines of the familiar and comfortable, pursuing an innovative idea alone, and sometimes in darkness, the explorer leaves the world we know behind in search of new sounds, sights and discoveries. This spirit thrives in both space exploration and the works of the Kronos Quartet, Terry Riley and Willie Williams, and they merge on stage in Sun Rings.

The NASA Art Program contacted Kronos in spring 2000 with an open invitation to take sounds of space and weave them into music. The sounds of space came from plasma wave receivers built by physicist Don Gurnett and flown on a variety of Earth orbiting and planetary spacecraft over a period of 40 years.

Listening for the first time to these eerie whistles, sirens and booms collected from hundreds of millions of miles away, Kronos Artistic Director David Harrington recalls they “sounded like part of nature, but not like any sounds I had ever heard before.”

Harrington knew right away that the composer to best bring these sounds into the work of Kronos would be longtime collaborator Terry Riley. When it came time for Riley to hear the sounds first-hand, Harrington says, “I wanted to see the expression on his face.” He soon realized they were about to embark upon a fascinating project, one unlike anything they had done before.

Among the sounds that Harrington and Riley listened to from Gurnett’s collection were those from the plasma wave receivers on the twin Voyager spacecraft which carried out the historic twelve-year exploration of the outer planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Many are familiar with the breathtaking pictures of Jupiter’s moons and Saturn’s rings taken by Voyager; however, the plasma wave sounds, and even the existence of such sounds, are not widely known.

It is common to think of space as a silent black vacuum. Since sound waves need air in order to propagate and there is no air in space, it seems to make sense that space is totally soundless. However, the space around and between the planets is not a total vacuum; it is filled with an ionized gas called a plasma—a gas so hot that its individual atoms are separated into their constituent electrically charged particles. The “plasma waves” that can propagate in this medium have characteristics similar to both sound waves and radio waves.

Although a sensitive microphone could in principle be used to detect these waves, the best way is to use an electrical antenna and a simple radio receiver. Reflecting on his early pioneering work, Gurnett says, “When we first launched a plasma wave receiver into Earth orbit in 1962 we were astonished to find that space was filled with such a rich variety of fascinating sounds.”

“What really got me going was when I met with Professor Gurnett and he told me about how he developed these devices and what these sounds actually were,” says composer Terry Riley. “It gave me a very visceral feeling. I started to look at space a little differently.”

A variety of phenomena in space can be detected via the plasma waves they make: whistling sounds made by lightning; bird-like sounds called chorus that are spontaneously produced by electrons trapped in the magnetic fields that surround planets such as Earth and Jupiter; whistling sounds from the charged particles that cause the Northern Lights; and at Jupiter, a roaring boom from a turbulent shock wave that forms upstream of the planet in the high-velocity plasma streaming away from the Sun called the solar wind, somewhat analogous to a sonic boom from an airplane.

The plasma waves recorded by Prof. Gurnett were not adjusted to accommodate our musical taste or the limited capability of our ears—the sounds represent the true frequency at which the signals were detected in space. This means that theoretically, if humans could somehow live out where these space probes were, and if we had sensitive enough ears, we could hear these very sounds. Luckily, we have spacecraft to go where no human ear ever has gone.

Visual designer Willie Williams reflects, “It was an arresting experience to hear the vast range of audio material collected from the different spacecraft.” He describes the noises as “ranging from piercing, strident white noise to the beautiful birdsong-like sounds of Chorus.”

He was also touched upon learning what else, besides the instruments, was included on the spacecraft. “When exploring the Voyager archive I discovered that there is a package of informational material on board in case the craft is discovered by alien life forms some time in the distant future. There are drawings and pictures of what human beings are and where we live, plus everyday scenes from around the world. Naturally these images were collected prior to the Voyager launches so they describe a world in a very different mood to our own. They seem so innocent and optimistic, especially when contrasted with images from the present day.”

Of course, the world has changed dramatically since the launch of the Voyager spacecraft in 1977. Riley’s work on Sun Rings took a definitive turn after the unforgettable attacks of September 11, 2001.

“I saw how the country was changing, and I knew the meaning had to be motivated by peaceful intentions—not revenge or patriotism, but real meaning about where we are as human beings, and where we should be going,” Riley reflects.

Though he contends he is not making a political statement in this composition, Riley notes that some of the wording accompanying Sun Rings contains messages about humanity and compassion. In what may be the most introspective of all the movements, “Prayer Central” serves as the opportunity to reflect in what Riley calls a “polyphony of prayers that goes drifting up.”

Certain sounds from the original Voyager recordings surface throughout the performance where Riley isolated what he found to be a musical phrase. However, at other times the instruments take over in melodies the space sounds only subtly suggested, and in other places the piece moves in an all-together new direction.

“I conceived the ten movements of Sun Rings to be a variety of spacescapes,” Riley says. “I pictured an imaginary audience traveling with Kronos in and around the planets, hearing the quartet and choir as they journeyed through the distant sounds of exotic atmospheres.”

“The space sounds are embedded in our sounds,” Harrington says. The end product is an 85-minute experience—a layering of different sounds and human voices.

Similarly, the visual design makes references to the original space sounds on and off. “Sometimes I have used imagery specific to the source sounds,” Williams says, “but more often what we are seeing during the performance is an abstraction based more loosely on the mood of the composition as a whole.”

Today the Voyager spacecraft are further away from Earth than any human-made object has ever been, and they climb deeper into space everyday dutifully carrying out their mission, and quietly carrying their messages from Earth. Inspired by and intermixed with the visions and spirit of Voyager, Sun Rings hopes to take both its creators and its audience to a place where we’ve never been.

Blake Marie Bullock lives in Southern California. She earned her B.A. in astrophysics from the university of California, Berkeley and an M.A. in astronomy from Wesleyan University. She writes both science journalism and fiction, and is currently working on a novel. Her fiction has appeared in VerbSap Magazine.

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