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inexplicable phenomenon

Whoa. How to explain this…?! I recently built an optical microphone or “sound camera” in the housing of an old Super 8 film camera. The optics focus onto a lightwave receiver, and this feeds a 1/4″ audio output jack. It plugs into any guitar amp. Focus on a light source in the viewfinder, and the modulations in the light become audible. Most light sources are pretty uninteresting, like light bulbs because they are running on 60Hz AC current - you just hear a hum. But other things are interesting… CRTs, cell phone displays, neon, fires, and the biggest fire of all, the sun.

The SUN sounds amazing, it makes a blasting static sound like pink noise through my guitar amp. I was really digging the sound of the sun and turned it up loud while I ate dinner. It started to go down and the sky turned a deeper blue color. I switched the amp to the distortion channel and cranked the gain up all the way to hear the details. The camera was focused on a patch of blue sky through the trees. After a minute of acclimation, I heard the faintest layer of coherent sound through the intense pink noise static. I sat down next to the amp and listened very hard! It sounded like tones. At first I did not believe my ears and blew it off. A minute later it was there again, it sounded like voices! It had to be radio interference, I thought. To test this, I put my hand in front of the lens to block the light from outside. The noise blast went away, and the voices were gone. If it was normal radio interference it would have been clear through this experiment, would you agree?. I moved my hand back away and the noise blast returned. I will swear that in this noise I heard something like a conversation between a man and a woman… and some tones inbetween. It was impossible to recognize the words or syllables, but it had the pitch fluctuations and broken intervals of speech.

Thus the fact is, I heard voices from the sky, in the sound of the sun.

So now the question is what kind of technology could be causing this??! I’ve never heard of commercial open-air lightwave communications - it seems foolish… light doesnt go around corners.

After the sun was down completely, the noise and voices were no longer to be heard. I will try again tomorrow and record anything interesting.

*** UPDATE 6/1/08: INEXPLICABLE PHENOMENON EXPLAINED! ***

I followed up the original sun listening session with a more controlled experiment. This time I recorded the sound of the sunrise at dawn. I focused on the same patch of blue sky as before and recorded for about 20 minutes. The pink noise of sunlight gradually rose above the amplifier’s hiss, and the recording showed a nice increase in amplitude as the sunlight brightened. As before, faint sounds were audible beneath the roar. I repeated the control experiment of blocking light to the camera with my hand. This time, I was able to hear the voices regardless of whether the sun entered the camera… so my original conclusion is now in question. Listen for yourself. It sounds like Christian radio…. “Jeeeeezus Christ!”

Sound of Dawn