A THUNDEROUS MOMENT IN TIME

A whistler is a very low frequency (VLF) electromagnetic (radio) wave generated by lightning. Frequencies of terrestrial whistlers are 1 kHz to 30 kHz, with maximum frequencies usually at 3 kHz to 5 kHz. Arching over the equator, whistlers are globetrotting signals, earth signals in the truest sense. The way the frequencies from the initial burst of lightning are spread out into a glissando is not dissimilar from how light is refracted and spread out into a rainbow

If we had an electrical ear with/in place of a sonic ear - our time markers (one can only imagine) would be slightly-radically different, and so would our space-time senses. We’d be in-circuit as much as we’d be in-time. We’d not just hear the bird’s dawn chorus, but also the dawn chorus of electromagnetic radio waves. In order to remind ourselves of nondescript and non-local time-space, we’d only have to return to our last memory of globe-trotting whistlers, wherein sounds from thunderstorms in Germany could be heard in Japan at almost the same time.

A Thunderous moment in time (a_t_m_t) is a sound piece which looks at micro-temporal understandings of time-space offered by the electromagnetic frequencies/ radio waves generated by thunder and lightning - in order to step back from notions of metabolic time and step into the abiotic micro-time of nondescript ever-moving electromagnetic energies.

a_t_m_t is composed solely via electromagnetic frequencies transducted into the audio range of VLF (very low frequencies) through A DIY VLF Receiver. VLF is a radio spectrum between 1 kHz and 30 kHz (a large part of which falls under the human hearing range), with wavelengths ranging 10 to 100 kms - beyond the range of human-generated radio signals. The signals received in this band are largely produced naturally by the Earth’s ionosphere.

Making VLF audible, helps make audible (among other things) the light-speed time of pops and clicks (a.k.a lightening-stroke statics/ radio atmospherics occurring almost 100 times pjher second) and the non-locality of globe-hopping whistlers (generated a second or two after lightening) travelling along the lines of Earth’s magnetosphere into near space and onto the opposite hemisphere.

Through stretching, granularizing, isolating, synthesizing, subtracting, and droning whistlers, cracks and pops into milliseconds, a_t_m_t expands on a single moment of thunderous time - one whistler - and speculates what listening to radio-light time could be like. By extracting milliseconds from the vast sea of VLF radio waves, emerge thin bands of non-local solitude.

The sound piece spends its time ( 9 minutes and 30 seconds) within the highly stretched space of many such single whistlers communicating with each other (much like the 1500-2000 lightening storms in progress on earth at any given moment in time), and exposing human bodies to a temporal phasing which metabolic ways of life often has limited or no access to.

 

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