Relaxing in Saturn’s Rings

A note from Ethan, Director of Music and Sound Design at Pzizz about this dreamscape:

“Saturn Set imagines the listener in a space voyager, gliding among Saturn’s rings as the sun fades.

We did several fun things with small snippets of audio recordings from the Cassini space mission. First, we took some of the more pleasant moments — keep in mind most of these space recordings sound like a mix between a white noise avalanche and a microwave dance party — and developed a soothing soundscape. After that we took tonal elements of the recordings, and fed them into a sampler, creating a keyboard-like instrument out of the actual sounds of Saturn. We then fleshed the music out with some classic Casio keyboard string harmonies, and an epic organ for the morphing ostinato movement in the lower register to compliment the synthesizer drones.

The piece also uses an important psychoacoustic technique: slowing down incrementally in the early sections, such that by several minutes in, the music has lulled to a tempo corresponding to a healthy resting heart rate for sleep.”

If you like this sample, check out our app, Pzizz; available for iOS and Android

New Dreamscape Prototype: Saturn Set was originally published in Pzillow Talk on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.