Elite Dangerous uses real-life space sounds recorded from Antarctica

rockpapershotgun.com:

Sci-fi space flight sim Elite Dangerous’ director has owned up that the game uses noise from recordings of actual space. David Braben said that Frontier Developments incorporate audio from projects such as the British Antactic Survey’s Halley Research Station, which is where the data was collected that revealed that classic environmental disaster, the hole in the ozone layer. Braben’s revelation was prompted by the recent public acknowledgement from NASA that, yes, people really can hear screams in space. Sort of.

Over the weekend, NASA’s exoplanets team released a remix of the sound from the Perseus galaxy cluster that they say includes the noise of its central black hole. I know, I’d not heard that one before either. Must be on their new album. The tune was a hit, and NASA even started promoting their Soundcloud off the back of it. I was looking into going to see them live but there isn’t another launch window for weeks.

The misconception that there is no sound in space originates because most space is a ~vacuum, providing no way for sound waves to travel. A galaxy cluster has so much gas that we've picked up actual sound. Here it's amplified, and mixed with other data, to hear a black hole! pic.twitter.com/RobcZs7F9e

The process used in NASA’s recording is something called sonification. You can read a layman's explanation of it here. The gist is that they take data and convert it into sound. If you want to check out more banging choons from NASA’s sonification project then there’s a site for that.

In a reply to a commenter, Braben confirmed that Frontier use sonification for Elite Dangerous. “We use various recordings of EM noise, turned into audio for specific locations - for example the noise of electrical