January 18, 2008
Kronos Quartet in Terry Riley’s Sun Rings
Kronos performs dreamy plasma at Stanford
In 2001 the Kronos quartet was contacted by NASA to see if the group was interested in “the sounds of space,” recordings of plasma waves from spacecraft. A plasma is a gas so hot that its electrons have been separated, transforming the neutral gas into a sea of charged ions. Our solar system is filled with a tenuous plasma, a solar wind that laps at the shores of worlds and interacts with planetary magnetic fields....