The Mission

On the evening of February 22nd, the very first sounds ever recorded on Mars were made available to the world. Just some blowing in the wind, but still Anders was inspired to go on a Mission to Mars, sampled the sounds on his tiny Pocket Operator K.O! and called up the rest of the B-boys, who of course immediately commenced countdown, engines on. So on February 23rd, we took our protein pills and put our helmets on.

Ground control

But as usual, there were some issues on the ground, feedback among them. We had more issues with feedback when speaking from city to city than expected. Our goal was to first try to set up and gain our portals to make talking and communicating verbally easier than we so far have experienced in classes, but even after gaining every connected microphones nicely, we didn’t quite achieve what we wanted. So we did some compromising and moved on to connecting some instruments.

In Trondheim, Willie played a pickup-equipped western guitar routed through a series of AmpliTube effects and connected to the Midas M32. In Oslo, Pedro brought his guitar, his PC, and his AKAI midi-board (everything connected via his sound-interface and lined in to the Midas M32), while Henrik played his sweet little Teenage Engineering OP-1 (also directly into the mixer). Anders, mostly sitting behind the control-panel (M32), connected his K.O! with a looped wind-sample from Mars.

Twinkle twinkle

The countdown started, and soon we set out into the unknown, without knowing where to start, but it didn’t take long before we saw familiar constellations, and also heard the saddest version of «Twinkle Twinkle Little Star» from Henrik’s OP-‘ on top of the floating reverberated and delayed plucking of Willie’s guitar, and some otherworldly sounds from Pedro’s computer along with his guitar picking. Mars is far away, even when passing the moon, but when we listened closely, we could also hear the wind blowing in a rhythmic pattern on our supposedly desolate red destination.

In space no one can hear you scream, but they might hear Twinkle Twinkle… sad version.

Back to earth

Behind the control panel of our B-oyager we discovered a severe error that could possibly explain some of our feedback issues before take-off. We returned to earth to start debugging and solve the issue. Even when no local instruments at UiO were sent to the master, they were very much there. That could be expected after sending our mix to Trondheim, and then possibly getting it back via microphones there. But as it firstly didn’t sound like room-sound, and secondly since all microphones at NTNU were muted, we dug deeper. What we discovered was that our signal sent to NTNU (stereo track via LoLa) was internally routed back to our mix, on the same tracks we received NTNU’s LoLa.

Before we figured out a way to try and solve the issue, the NTNU-portal was abandoned due to budget cuts at NASA. All American astronauts in the B-oyager program are now expected to fund further expeditions via NASA’s new dog-walking business. Once Willie has finished walking the dogs of various wealthy senators, we will explore this further, and hopefully our next attempt will take us one small step closer to Mars.

Oslo, we have a problem !!!!