PLANETARY PLUG- INS
Stefana Fratila’s Sononaut Gives New Meaning to “Music of the Spheres”
HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED WHAT THE PLANETS SOUND LIKE?
Toronto producer Stefana Fratila has, and she went on a five-year mission to find out.
Back in 2017, Fratila was looking to represent the planets of our solar system with plug-ins: software within a digital audio workstation that can be used to add instruments or effects to a song. Plug-ins like virtual synths, compressors and equalizers can be crucial for musicians trying to create a particular atmosphere. Unfortunately for Fratila, the planetary plug-ins she was looking for didn’t exist.
At this point, most people would accept that their new track simply isn’t going to sound like Saturn, but Fratila isn’t most people. After acquiring a FACTOR grant for the project, Fratila began contacting people at NASA. Once she found the right scientists, they got her approved to visit Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA, to access data and conduct interviews for her project.
Aside from gaining valuable knowledge about atmospheric science, Fratila learned that NASA scientists were curious about the same things she was. They too wanted sound from space, but it was in short supply.
That all changed mid-project, however: “In 2020, they sent up the Mars Rover [Perseverance],” Fratila tells Exclaim! “I knew that was happening when I started this
“I FELT LIKE I COULD TAKE QUITE A BIT OF CREATIVE LIBERTY BECAUSE I WAS COMING AT IT AS AN ARTIST, NOT AS A SCIENTIST.”
project, so myself and all the scientists I had been working with were very excited. This would be the first time that actual microphones would be sent to a planet’s surface. It was unprecedented.”
The eight open-source plug-ins themselves, titled Sononaut — and Fratila’s eight-track album I want to leave this Earth behind (out April 21), made using them — lie at an interesting crossroads of the artistic and scientific mind. Mars is in the bag, and obviously we have audio of Earth, but the rest of the planets are trickier. We’re not sending audio equipment to the remaining planets anytime soon, so the plug-ins for the rest of the planets would need to come from imagination — albeit based heavily in data and research.
“I felt like I could take quite a bit of creative liberty because I was coming at it as an artist, not as a scientist,” says Fratila. “I was really interested in having these plugins reflect my interpretation. I’ve never claimed that these are factual or anything. Any scientist will tell you that everything can be disputed. We might be completely wrong about certain aspects of these plugins, but this is based on the information we have currently.”
The plug-ins each have four faders (Dry, Atmosphere, Pitch and Weather), that can be moved around to create different effects — except the Mercury plug-in, which just has Dry, Weather and Ear to Ground, as the planet doesn’t have an atmosphere.
Fratila says, “That’s the beauty of this project. It got me thinking about how sound would work on all these planets.”