Sky Ear will be a one-night event in which a glowing "cloud" of mobile phones and helium balloons is released into the air so that people can dial into the cloud and listen to the sounds of the sky. 
The cloud will be made of one thousand large helium balloons each responding to the electromagnetic environment (created by distant storms, mobile phones, police and ambulance radios, television broadcasts, etc.) with coloured blue, red and yellow lights. The balloons will be enclosed in a carbon fibre and net structure 25m in diameter tethered to the ground by 6 cables and held aloft at a height of 60m where it will remain for several hours.
Using mobile phones people will be able to listen to the actual sounds up high, the electromagnetic sounds of the sky as well as streams of "whistlers" and "spherics" (atmospheric electromagnetic phenomena that are the audible equivalent of the Northern Lights).Of course, the action of calling the cloud changes the electromagnetic environment inside and causes the balloons to vary in brightness, colour and intensity." [Source: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich]
This non-rigid "cloud," made up of several hundred glowing helium balloons, will be embedded with mobile phones. The balloons will contain miniature sensor circuits (simple gaussmeters) that detect levels of electromagnetic radiation at a variety of frequencies. When activated, the sensor circuits will cause ultra-bright coloured LEDs to illuminate. The cloud will glow and flicker brightly as it passes through varying radio and microwave spaces.
As visitors to the event call into the cloud to listen to the distant electromagnetic sounds of the sky (including whistlers and spherics), their mobile phone calls will change the local hertzian topography; these disturbances in the electromagnetic fields inside the cloud will alter the glow intensity of that part of the balloon cloud. Feedback within the sensor network will create ripples of light reminiscent of rumbling thunder and flashes of lightning. People may find that they are in the process collaborating with others to create patterns of light activity across the surface of the cloud.
[Source: Project Creator's Site]
More details in this PDF brochure.
You can watch the whole thing as a live webcast at 7 pm Brit time, or about noon—not exactly sure—here in the midwest. They'll go live several hours earlier.


















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