Listening to Apollo 11
Project Leads: Dale MacDonald and Heidi Rae Cooley
Design / Production Team:
David Wilson
Caroline Trotter
Eva Jacobus
Special thanks:
John Hansen, Center for Robust Speech Systems, UTD
Materials:
3 channel interactive audio installation
Archival audio material from analog Apollo 11 mission audio, digitized by the Center for Robust Speech Systems at UT Dallas
Raspberry Pi, speakers, RFID cards, RFID reader
Project Description:
Neil Armstrong’s proclamation, “One small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind,” is the most famous testimony of the historical significance of the first moon landing on July 20, 1969.
Over the course of eight days, many other voices, statements, and conversations marked other significant moments of the mission. For example, during the descent of the lunar module on that same day, a tense and extensive conversation ensued among people at distributed stations of Mission Control about an alarm emanating from the flight control computer. The public never heard this conversation, but for the engineers and astronauts it was extremely significant given the riskiness of the mission. In this interactive, you can listen to the multi-channel conversation about the “1202 alarm,” which is one of twelve short multi-channel conversations from that historic mission.
Ground-breaking research by the Center for Robust Speech Systems (CRSS) at the University of Texas at Dallas allows us to hear the conversations as only a few people in Mission Control would have heard. CRSS successfully digitized 1000s of hours of recorded communications between astronauts, mission control and back-room staff.
Listening to Apollo 11, a public listening experience, draws on this vast audio archive. Visitors can listen to mission conversations never before heard by the public. The installation highlights the importance of research into speech processing technologies, as well as the role that audio research plays in understanding complex historic systems of communication.