I was checking out the excellent MemeFirst blog, where Stefan had posted a gorgeous color picture of Saturn’s rings, taken by NASA’s Cassini space probe. I totally agreed with Stefan’s writeup (“Best. Wallpaper. Ever.”) but when looked at the picture, I was suddenly reminded of Coagula, a cool little application that transforms the data from pictures into sound effects. I blogged about this a while ago, when I used Coagula to transform a picture of my face into music. So I thought, hmmm, I wonder what sound you’d get out of that picture of the rings?

Voila: I booted up Coagula, ran the picture through, and produced this little MP3 file — the music of the spheres. Fittingly for an image produced in deepest space, it sounds kind of like a Dalek firing on helpless earthlings. Exterminate! Ex-ter-minate!

Man, I should get back to work. I can just imagine one of my editors calling me to find out the status of their overdue copy. “Oh, sorry — I’ve been busy generating sound effects from photos of Saturn’s rings.” Dead silence.

(Thanks to MemeFirst for this one!)