Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The phrase Spatial Audio takes on new meaning this week as audio recordings are starting to be released from Perseversance’s EDL camera and microphone subsystem as it begins its search for life on Mars.

Music has long been used to express and give emotional support to our fascination with space, from Holtz’s The Planet Suite to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon, to Bowie’s Life On Mars – recorded exactly fifty years ago, with its many now-uncomfortably precient lyrical references.

Congratulations to DPA microphones for supplying the 4006 Omni mics (we’re not sure if this was the system that captured with first Martian wind, but it’ll surely come into play at some stage if Perseverance’s lead engineer at JPL, Dave Gruel (truly) has anything to say about it.

Low Resonance
We wonder if Perseverance’s ‘ears’ will be able to detect any Martian Schumann Resonances or indeed detect planet Earth’s 7.83Hz monster sub-bass tone but such matters continue to fascinate ASSR’s Alan Parsons, who played his space-sounds-focused One Note Symphony at NASA’s 50th Anniversary Apollo 11 mission back in 2019 at Cocoa FL back in 2019, supported by Neil Armstrong’s son Rick Armstrong and his prog rock outfit Edison’s Children. You can’t make this stuff up! 

Don’t miss the ASSR-Online Recording Course FREE Trial! And speaking of not making stuff up, how is your knowledge of audio? No, seriously. Wouldn’t you like to feel confident about technical terms, processes, how to use pre-delay and the best way to record a kick drum…? Well you can. Enroll in ASSR’s online recording course www.artandscienceofsound.com/assr-online and be prepared to turbocharge your knowledge of recording. With a renewed level of interest in all things audio you’ll thank your lucky stars you did. The value might be Sun and Moon but the cost is absolutely down to earth. ASSR-Online is simply the best value course of its kind on the planet (or any other, so far as we know–but that could change!). Not only does it come with 26 lesson modules to get you up-to-warp-speed with acoustics, consoles, microphones, EQ, compression, delays and reverbs and more, there’s a ton of music multitracks to download and play with, quizzes to take, private forums to surf and post on, and much more. And if you’re still skeptical, enlist in the FREE Trial where you can browse and take the entire first lesson module. Alan Parsons in a world of his own from ASSR-Online’s video lesson module on Computers & Digital Audio.