Listening to the Machinery of Exploration

When I think about the exploration of space, I don’t imagine the countdown to launch or the roar of the rocket, I imagine the quiet that comes after, the distant hum of machinery and the faint echo of systems adjusting to alien environments. Those are the sounds that I try and capture in my work with the Adelaide Rover Team.

How it begins

My soundscapes begin with recordings taken from the rover itself, the delicate noises that arise during its construction and testing. These are then abstracted through a compositional matrix, developed to process and shape the recordings into new forms and textures. The results are not literal representations of the Rover’s sound but an interpretation of its essence, the rhythms of its movement, and the interplay between human design and mechanical function.

Each soundscape is under 5 minutes long and connects a human activity system to a specific Rover component or collection of components. They reflect processes such as the construction of human habitats, agriculture and terraforming new environments, and managing water, systems that will be vital for sustaining life beyond Earth.

They are meditations on technology, distance and our ongoing desire to explore. The sounds are ambient, sometimes dark, often spacious, suggesting the vastness and uncertainty of deep space rather than the triumph of reaching it.

For me, art provides a way to pause and reflect. Science and engineering push ever forward, but art can look sideways and listen to what that push might mean. In these soundscapes, I’m interested in how technology sounds when it is removed from its immediate function, when it’s heard as something mysterious or poetic.

I hope that when people encounter these works, they sense the technology and the sense of exploration that drives its creation. Awe, mystery and curiosity, these are the emotional spaces that art and science both share. The sounds may seem unfamiliar, but that is their invitation, an invitation to imagine what lies beyond and to feel the pull of the unknown.

These pieces are less about the Rover itself and more about what it represents, our quiet ongoing attempts to reach into the future.

My Soundscapes

The soundscapes I made for our rover - Romulus - for the 2025 Australian Rover Challenge - can be found here.