If you zoom in on the surface of a vinyl record using a microscope, it kind of looks like a series of mountains and valleys to the untrained eye. It’s actually the waveform representation of a song or other sounds, but what would happen if you took a map of the Earth’s mountains and valleys and turned that into a record? The results, of course, sound terrible.
A project called the Flat Earth Society used elevation map data from NASA to create a record that essentially has microscopic versions of the Rocky Mountains, the Himalayas, the Alps, and even the Grand Canyon. The record looks cool, as the grooves of course create a pattern that mirrors a map of the world. But when played back it’s just a garbled mess of hiss, noise and random pops. Thankfully there are eight other planets in our solar system we can try, maybe Mars’ craters and valleys are secretly hiding a number one hit? [Vimeo via Notcot]