Courtney Hoskins, Ether Twist (Excerpt)

Ether Twist, my first sound film, is a meditation on various properties of light. The soundtrack consists of Natural VLF radio recordings. (Natural VLF (Very-Low-Frequency) Radio - also called Natural Radio - is audio-frequency radio signals of Earth in the approximate range of 200 Hz to beyond 10,000 Hz (10 kHz). They are not man-made but occur naturally in nature.) Their origins vary but include lightning storms, the Earth's magnetic field, and the Aurora Borealis and Australis (Northern & Southern Lights). All of these sources produce an amazing variety of sounds, such as sferics (lightning-stroke static), tweeks, whistlers, choruses (chirping, barking and squawking radio sounds produced by the Sun's solar-wind hitting the Earth's magnetic-field), various kinds of hiss, bizarre wavering-tone emissions, and an endless variety of fascinating radio sounds.