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"The Robert L. Forward novel Dragon's Egg begins with an intrepid graduate student refusing to accept that a noisy satellite signal is just a malfunction. It must have some meaning, she thinks-and it does, turning out to herald the passing by of an inhabited neutron star (and making graduate school look rather easy). Even a malfunction, though, wouldn't really have been noise. We'd have to assume that some satellite engineer would be interested. In fact, it's hard to imagine any signal coming from space that would be of no interest to anyone. The noisiest signals are even sometimes the most important. Microwave and gravitational wave backgrounds, for example. Our modern definition of noise, as unwanted sound or signal, is a relatively recent one. The word used to mean strife, and nausea. Is the new meaning a useful ontology? Or does it encourage us to dismiss what we can't interpret? Welcome to "Noise.""

"Space is the place. Again. And SoundCloud is now a place you can find sounds from the US government space agency, NASA. In addition to the requisite vocal clips ("Houston, we've had a problem" and "The Eagle has landed"), you get a lot more. There are rocket sounds, the chirps of satellites and equipment, lightning on Jupiter, interstellar plasma and radio emissions. And in one nod to humanity, and not just American humanity, there's the Soviet satellite Sputnik (among many projects that are international in nature)."

"The first sound ever was the sound of the Big Bang. And, surprisingly, it doesn't really sound all that bang-like. John Cramer, a researcher at the University of Washington, has created two different renditions of what the big bang might have sounded like based on data from two different satellites."

This is an article about wind, dust, and their relations to life. It is a meditation on the liveliness of wind and airborne particles as they are experienced on the ground; in cultural texts including film, poetry, and oral history; and in the medium of satellite imagery. In dialogue with recent work in the social sciences and humanities that demonstrates how air and dust from the "South" are treated as foreign "intrusions" into Europe, this article proposes a focus on wind's animacies to further probe and nuance these claims. Situated primarily in Italy and the Balkans, two places where the author has familial relations and, in the case of the Balkans, deep ancestral history, the animacies of wind are examined specifically in relation to Scirocco and Jugo, two interrelated southerly winds commonly blowing in spring and autumn that sometimes bring "Saharan dust" to Europe. As a framework and scaffold, the article draws from Mel Chen's notion of "differential animacies": the ways animacy is bestowed on humans, animals, elements, and objects in hierarchies that are both revealing and "leaky." Exploring the animacies of Scirocco and Jugo shows how the wind acts as a force of de/humanization, as agency leaking across borders of life and nonlife, and as shape-shifting coauthor of collective memory.

What kinds of sounds can you find in New York City? With sound-seeker, you can zoom, pan and search for sounds with interactive satellite photos or detailed maps.