- These strange sounds would be so exciting in real life.
There are a lot of strange sounds in this world and only some of us can hear them. Is it you?
Sounds on the Moon
Obviously you’d have to be on the moon to have heard the music but did you think they were hearing music up there? Astronauts on the Apollo 10 mission got an earful of music and they described it as pretty eerie. While the crew was orbiting the far side of the moon, they began to hear this “weird music.” Transcripts later released from NASA in 2008 had the “outer space” music for an hour and wondered if they should report it. Eventually they explained away the music as radio interference between the command and lunar modules.
Lonely Whale Sounds
An American military network was listening in for nuclear submarines in 1989 when they recorded an odd noise. The speech pattern was familiar and that of a blue whale but the main singing notes were uniquely high-pitched and registered at 52 hertz. To the human ear, this could sounds like a low bass note but most whale talk registers between 10-40 hertz and so it was said that “Sad Moby” may have trouble communicating with other whales. After watching the whale for decades, researchers discovered that it’s voice dropped to around 47 hertz and that whales may have different “dialects” and therefore Sad Moby may have been able to “make friends” with whales that spoke closer to his language. Poor whale, making strange sounds to his friends.
Planet Sounds
This isn’t for other planets, yet our planet Earth. The low “hum” cannot be heard by humans but an incredibly sensitive seismograph did pick up the sound in the 1990s. After extensive studies were published in 2015, we found out the Earth has complex vibrations that cause it to ring like a bell. Computer models tracked it and found the vibrations were occurring around and inside the Earth constantly, even without the presence of earthquakes. The noise sounds like every wave in the ocean hitting against the shore and sea bed in a slow rhythm. Ocean waves make faint seismic waves with super slow sound frequencies, between 13 and 300 seconds. It’s thought that in the longest of these waves is where the sound is eventually generated.
Baby Volcanoes
There was world-wide seismic activity that started in May 2018 with major activity detected and a strange humming sound for the next few months. By November 2018, some seismic signals were lasting up to 20 minutes and members of the scientific community were lining up to figure it out. During the study over 7,000 tectonic earthquakes were recorded with the most severe magnitude at 5.9 in May 2019. The earthquakes were traced to the island of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean, between Africa and Madagascar. These quakes and ongoing seismic signals came from 22 miles of the eastern coast of the island, where a baby volcano was in the early stages of forming deep underwater. Of course a wanna be volcano is out there making strange sounds, it’s an erupting being!
Northern Lights Sounds
Did you know that the northern lights make sound? If you listen from the right place, that is. The first audio recordings of the auroras in September 2011, by Unto Laine. He first got interested in the sound of the sky when he heard crackling/popping in the skies of Finnish Lapland. He set up a microscope in the snow and waited when suddenly an intense aurora appeared in the sky. He was shocked then he calculated the sound of the aurora as a mere 230 feet above him. Auroras are created when solar flares interact with the Earth’s magnetic field and thus the sounds are a combination of electrical changes being trapped and released into the cold air.
It would be such an experience to hear these sounds. Let me know in the comments what strange sounds you’d like to hear.
For more on sounds, follow the link and enjoy 6 Fun Facts About Pianos.