Heavenly Sounds
web design, UX, coding
Rhode Island School of Design
Heavenly Sounds is an online catalog of strange, disturbing-yet-beautiful NASA recordings from outer space. The interface is inspired by radars and radio dials, and the process of search and discovery.
1. Upon entering the site, the user is met with nothing but a slider and an expandable message prompting them to drag the slider and look for beauty in the void.
2. Six sounds are hidden along the slider, each in its own area of discovery. As the slider reaches each area, the corresponding sound plays automatically, the sparse layout gives way to a cosmic landscape in motion, and data about the sound is logged in the left side of the screen—informing the user about the sound they are listening to, the date it was recorded and by which spacecraft, and its origin’s distance from earth, ranging from a couple hundred kilometers to 1470 light years.
3. Once a sound is logged, it can be listened to at any time by clicking its name in the log. Clicking the name again stops the playback.
4. When the user first enters the site, their starting position along the slider is randomized. Thus the order each user discovers the sounds, and accordingly the order of their log, will be different. The cosmic landscape is also randomized each time it appears, resulting in a variety of star size, distance and formation—referencing the immeasurable vastness of outer space.