# The Raw Feed...

- Site: Analog Industries
- Author: Chris Randall
- Date: 2008-05-26
- URL: https://analogindustries.com/2008/05/the-raw-feed/

I'm a fan of our space program here in the U.S.A., and it is one of the very few things that can excite patriotic fervor in me; I tend to look on nationalism as the fountain of all things stupid that aren't directly a result of religion in this world, but in this one little case I do give myself a little bit of leeway. Today, the Phoenix lander plopped its fat little ass down on Mars, and I got the itch to start farming the data for interesting tidbits.

I've referenced NASA many times in the various Micronaut releases. Starting with Io, I got in the habit of mining the various NASA pages for data which I would endeavor to use in interesting ways. Many of the sounds on the various Micronaut albums are telemetry from various NASA missions imported in to Sound Forge as RAW, then carved in to interesting things. NASA also has a pretty vast well of sound files, if you know [where to look,](http://www.nasa.gov/news/media/audioclips/index.html) and these can be used as source data for various things.

One nice feature of all the data that NASA puts out on a daily basis (and there is a metric fuckton of it, believe you me) is that it is all bought and paid for by the American public, and is thus public in its own right. You can use any of the raw data NASA puts up on its various sites without having to sweat copyright or get permission or any of that nonsense. (Some of the data is owned by universities, and some images are the result of private citizens or companies parsing the raw data in their own mechanisms, and these are copyrighted, so you do have to pay a bit of attention. The safe bet: if there's no copyright information on the page, it is free for all.)

In any case, the easiest thing to do if you're grabbing raw telemetry data is to open in the editor of your choice as RAW. Finding the raw data for a particular mission can be kind of tricky, but trust me, it's [all out there](http://www.igpp.ucla.edu/cache1/GOHIC_5001/DATA/) somewhere. That link is for some raw telemetry from the Galileo mission, for a blast from the past. The .PKT files are the raw packets. The vast majority of data from these deep space missions is imagery, but it will be in formats from 20-30 years ago, so it's not like opening a GIF or JPEG. Your mileage may vary.

So, that's my general methodology, and sometimes it can provide useful results, with a bit of trial and error. Is there any funny source that you like to farm for interesting sounds?

## Comments (11)

**12ax7heaven** (2008-05-26):

I have a tape echo that uses 8 Track cartridges. I have used various tapes of other artists found at thrift stores to much delight.

**HonkyMoFo** (2008-05-26):

This is only tangentially related to your post, but you might appreciate it.

My father worked in the aerospace industry for several decades, first as a technical writer for General Dynamics and TRW and later as a semi-freelance proposal consultant. He worked on civilian, military and NASA programs, and until he retired, held a top secret government clearance.

I remember one time back in the 70’s he took me with him into the bowels of the aerospace division of TRW, (at the appropriately named address of “One Space Park” in Redondo Beach, CA), flashing his red colored TOP SECRET identification badge to allow us to pass by a series of ever increasingly more pensive looking armed security guards, the last of which were US military soldiers as I recall.


It was like something out of a movie, passing from minimum security sections with a pass code and a security badge into increasingly higher levels of security clearance, only he was able to bring this young kid along with him for show and tell. Imagine that happening in today’s environment of fear and secrecy, especially with our current administration.

The highlight was getting to watch, through a big glass window, a clean room full of white jumpsuit and mask wearing engineers actually building a fairly large satellite. I remember a whole shitload of gold plated foil covering almost everything. I don’t recall what the satellite was for, but it was amazing to see it all up close.

My father wasn’t a big fan of NASA throughout his career. He said it was a myth that NASA was credited with all those wonderful technological advances. The real credit, for better or worse, goes to the all those black book military projects. He considered manned space exploration to be the biggest boondoggle of them all.

**BirdFLU** (2008-05-26):

I'm digging the latest Mars mission too. For whatever reason the main NASA page always sucks for having good photos of any mission. For better and more photos of the current Mars mission:

http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/images.php?gID=437&cID=8

**Peppe** (2008-05-26):

I'm a bit lazy when it comes to finding interesting sites, so a big thanks for those two links. For you, BirdFLU, as well.

(downloading) (opening Metasynth) (smiling)

Being a softhead, this may be off-topic again, but currently I'm doing a sample replica of an old Yamaha Electone D-85 organ (i.e. 115 kg of cheese) sitting in the corner of my studio. That and Mars mission, what a week for a geek!

**stevo83** (2008-05-26):

I seem to remember that the British Library website has an archive of various sound files (nature, old band recordings, interviews etc.). Though the selection doesnt seem to be very large.

**Dale** (2008-05-26):

I hooked Live to NASATV yesterday and recorded some of the chatter for a future processing. Along the same vein, here is earthquake data pitch shifted to audio. I thought it might be a good filter mod.

http://www.auditory-seismology.org/version2004/distance.html

**Tomer** (2008-05-26):

Lets hope for frozen water because earth is getting too populated...

**subbasshead** (2008-05-26):

Shortwave radio is a good source of intriguing sounds & noises - with an anlog tuning dial can be manipulated to a degree before sampling... I've also used temperature-change sounds recorded with a contact mic eg freezing a cymbal in dry ice & recording the pings & tinks as it warms up again... ditto for my toasted sandwich maker which produces great ramping clicks as it first warms up...

**fictionmusic** (2008-05-26):

Cool links Chris.

Here are some other similar sites with interesting sounds, both terrestial and extra-terrestial.

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/sounds/

http://www-pw.physics.uiowa.edu/mcgreevy/

http://www.dxzone.com/cgi-bin/dir/jump2.cgi?ID=10480

http://www-pw.physics.uiowa.edu/space-audio/sounds/

some nature sounds:

http://ars.usda.gov/pandp/docs.htm?docid=10919#musca

http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/gallery/sound/sound.html

and some novelty sites (not for ea but for fun ie):

http://www.spacesounds.com/missions/index.html

http://www.spacesounds.com/navigator/index.html

**creature** (2008-05-27):

I have been playing around with a tool called audiopaint recently.

http://www.nicolasfournel.com/audiopaint.htm

It basically turns images into sound. Each line in the image becomes its own oscilator. You can get some strange results with a bit of fiddling around.

This sort of thing is probably not new, but I only came by it the other month.

I have been experimenting with converting photos aswell as making specific images for to process.

So not a sound source as such, but another tool for manipulating data into sound. I might give it a whirl with some of these nasa images.

**tomax** (2008-05-27):

when dealing with raw data, it's cool to have a tool that will let you set/nudge the bit-depth and column-width of the input data interactively and display it graphically to see how order emerges when you get things aligned correctly, and "what the frequency is Kenneth" ;).

you can see something similar in hex-editors depending on how wide your column view is. i had someone write this for me ages ago on SGI IRIX - is there anything out there like that on PC or Mac? seems like an interesting Mathematica or Processing project... it's amazing what you can see or figure out just with that and yer own monkey-pattern-recognition.

@creature or other interested Macfolk - check out MetaSynth and Virsyn's CUBE/Poseidon. spendy but there's heaps of weird and awesome shit wrapped up in em.