Aurora over Halley Research Station in Antarctica. Crediot: Antony Dubber

At the edge of Antarctica, where the air is clean and the human world thins out, a strange instrument listens to the planet.

The antenna at Halley Research Station does not record whales, cracking ice or wind. It catches very low frequency radio waves made by lightning, solar storms and charged particles moving through Earth’s magnetic field. To most scientists, the signals help explain space weather. To Nigel Meredith, a space weather researcher at the British Antarctic Survey, they also sounded like the beginning of a composition.

When converted into audio, Meredith told Science News, the radio waves from space make “weird and wonderful noises.” Some crackle. Some whistle. Some chirp like birds at dawn. Now those signals have become music.

The Sounds of Space Project, a collaboration between Meredith, multimedia artist Diana Scarborough and composer Kim Cunio, released a new album, Infinitas Formas, on June 15. The record blends music with sounds gathered during a 2025 Southern Ocean expedition aboard the RRS Sir David Attenborough, including penguins, seals, wind, shipboard machinery and underwater recordings.

It is art, but it is also an invitation to hear planetary physics as something intimate, fragile and alive.

The Planet Has a Radio Voice

Some of Earth’s natural radio emissions fall between about 100 hertz and 10 kilohertz, within the range humans can hear once researchers convert the electromagnetic signals into audio files. The British Antarctic Survey’s Halley receiver listens from the Brunt Ice Shelf, beneath converging geomagnetic field lines that make Antarctica a useful listening post for space weather.

The British Antarctic Survey’s AutoVLF system records space weather as part of the Electro-Magnetic Quiet Area (EMQA) at Halley Resarch Station running the ULTRA experiment. Credit: BAS.

These are not sound waves in air. They are oscillating electric and magnetic fields. But once translated into audio, they become startlingly familiar.

Lightning, for instance, produces short bursts called sferics. They sound like a crackling fire or static snapping through an old radio. Other lightning phenomena produce whistling sounds because some radio waves from lightning escape into space, travel along Earth’s magnetic field and return in the opposite hemisphere. Because high frequencies arrive first, these “whistlers” slide downward in pitch.

Each lightning flash emits a short radio pulse, known as a spheric, which covers a wide range of frequencies. These are heard as short cracks. Credit: Sound of Space/BAS. Some of the radio waves from lightning strikes are “whistlers”.

Other sounds come from deeper in the magnetosphere. During solar storms, energetic electrons enter the region around Earth controlled by its magnetic field. The same activity can help produce auroras. It can also generate chorus waves, named because they resemble birdsong. Chorus waves tend to peak around dawn, much like actual bird choruses, which makes the resemblance even more uncanny.

Unlike whistlers, chorus emissions are generated deep within the magnetosphere itself.

While these audio conversions are interesting at their own, scientists have very serious reasons to study these phenomena. Space weather can interfere with satellites, radio communications, GPS systems and power grids. NOAA notes that energetic particles can damage satellite electronics, while solar flares and geomagnetic storms can disrupt communications and navigation systems.

From Data to an Emotional Experience

The Sounds of Space Project began after Meredith met Scarborough at an art-science event in Cambridge. According to the project website, they started working together in 2017 to find new ways of visualizing space weather data. Cunio later joined to turn some of the audio samples into musical compositions.

The team has since made albums, films, performances, lectures and dance works. Scarborough told Science News, “We each bring our unique perspectives, skills and curiosity.” She added, “We aim to evoke the beauty, wonder and vastness of space as emotional, experiential works while remaining grounded and inspired by the science.”

Sonification — turning data into sound — has become increasingly common in science communication, especially in astronomy. NASA has released audio versions of data from black holes, star-forming regions and planetary magnetospheres. In 2016, NASA’s Juno spacecraft recorded radio emissions from Jupiter’s auroras, signals that sounded like a vast alien surf once translated into sound.

But the Antarctic project is unusual because it begins on Earth, with instruments built for research, and then lets artists reshape the data without severing it from its scientific origin.

In Aurora Musicalis, for instance, Meredith’s Halley recordings of space weather during the stunning aurora australis (the Southern Lights) were paired with Cunio’s piano. “We use these waves to explore the science behind space storms, to improve our understanding of how space weather might affect our climate system, and to detect lightning,” Meredith said.

Why This Is More Than Novelty

A skeptical listener might ask whether this is science or soundtrack. The answer is both, though not in the same way.

No one forecasts a solar storm by listening to an album. But sound can reveal patterns differently from scientific charts. It can also make invisible systems feel less abstract.

Space weather remains oddly underappreciated. Modern life depends on satellites, navigation, electrical grids and communications systems, all vulnerable to solar activity.

The new album also brings the story back down to Earth. Infinitas Formas uses field recordings from a polar expedition studying how climate change affects nutrient release from polar regions. The listener moves from cosmic radio to ship decks, wind, penguins, seals and the Southern Ocean.

The sounds may seem otherworldly. But that is the point. Earth, heard through its magnetic field, is stranger than we usually allow it to be.