Hear sonifications of real space phenomena
Listen to real audio recordings and sonifications from NASA space missions — the electromagnetic crackle of Jupiter's magnetosphere, the rhythmic pulses of a distant pulsar, the chirp of gravitational waves detected by LIGO, and the haunting sounds of Saturn's rings converted to audio. Select a sound source from the library, adjust the volume and mix, and play cosmic audio directly in your browser. All recordings are sourced from real NASA mission data — these are genuine signals from space, converted to human-audible frequencies.
💡 NASA's Voyager 1 plasma wave instrument captured the 'sounds' of interstellar space in 2012 — a faint but unmistakable hum that proved it had crossed into interstellar medium for the first time in human history.
Pure mechanical sound waves cannot travel through the vacuum of space because there are no air molecules to compress. However, electromagnetic waves and plasma oscillations can be recorded and converted into audible frequencies — that is what NASA calls 'sonification', and what every recording on this page actually is.
Sonifications of real spacecraft data reveal eerie textures: Voyager 1 captured a faint plasma hum after crossing into interstellar space in 2012, Saturn's rings produce a hiss-like static in radio frequencies, and pulsars beat with steady millisecond rhythms. Black hole pressure waves in the Perseus cluster have been pitched up by 57 octaves to be audible.
Most recordings come from spacecraft instruments: Voyager 1 and 2 plasma wave subsystems, Cassini's radio and plasma wave science, Juno's Waves instrument at Jupiter, and the Chandra X-ray observatory. The data is shifted into the human audible range (20 Hz–20 kHz) by NASA scientists working with sonification specialists.
In 2022 NASA released a sonification of pressure waves in hot gas around the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Perseus galaxy cluster. The original waves cycle every 10 million years; raising the pitch 57–58 octaves brings them into human hearing range as a deep, otherworldly drone.