[microsound] "Spacey-Noises"

[PAULO R. C. BARROS]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6dajjU_VzY

"Spacey-Noises"

by Paulo R. C. Barros, video 
by Georges Bormand, sci-fi short story


Who said that in space one doesn't hear any noise? It's true for one who is in the real void, of course, out of the spatial ship. But inside the ship, when it runs at thousands of kilometers per second, the rubbing of tiny atoms of hydrogen against the sides of the ship suffices to produce a permanent whistling which fills the cabin.
Every time the ship accelerates, the noise becomes shriller; not counting encounters with more or less dense clouds of various atoms. It is a lancinating music; isn't it, really, what eulogized Huygens as "the music of spheres"?
Some astronauts cannot stand it, and they need to mask it with their favorite music records constantly playing throughout the trip; I love it, it is the music of my voyages in space, and when I am not in flight I miss it. Every change in the sound, in the tone or in the loudness, wakes me up when I am sleeping.
I recorded a few minutes of particularly pretty sounds (it's my taste, how do you dare to contest it?), and corresponding images from the control screens of the ship.
When I play them, some feel sorry for me and ask: « How can you endure such uproar a whole flight long? »
I feel sorry for them, who are not able to recognize beauty. Poor men.
I must tell that the flight during which I recorded these minutes was not an easy going one ; the rocket nearly crashed on a large asteroid ; when I talk of a near miss, I mean that I passed at about 10 kilometers from the asteroid ; but ten kilometers from the rocky core is a zone where the concentration in gaseous molecules is already more than one hundred times that of the ordinary void, and the concert I owed to the hail of shots against the walls of the ship was proportional to this increasing. In all, between the actions needed to avoid collision when I discovered the danger, and the trajectory corrections to compensate for both deviations, the avoiding moves and the consequences of the meeting, I needed to work many hours; thus the record reminds me also of the needed wariness in every flight.
Besides, it is now time that I put all my attention upon the present flight, before an accident occurs because I am absent-mindedly speaking to you... 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://or8.net/pipermail/microsound/attachments/20090719/6456bc19/attachment.htm