Your chance to ‘scream in space’ using a smartphone

Image taken in stratosphere using Android phone (CUSF) London – Cambridge University Cambridge students will be loading human screams onto a smartphone that will be blasted into outer space later this year. The public are invited to submit their screams, which will be emitted while in orbit at the same time as the phone records - to test if it’s possible to capture the sound of screaming in space. It was Ridley Scott’s film Alien that gave us the now legendary tagline: In space no one can hear you scream. Now, a Cambridge student society will use the technology in your pocket to find out if this is really the case.
Cambridge University Spaceflight (CUSF) will be uploading videos of people screaming into a specially developed smartphone app, housed on a Google Android phone that will be shot into space as part of a satellite payload in early December. Once in orbit, the phone will play the screams at full volume, while at the same time recording audio.
The phone will then relay back to Earth pictures of each ‘scream’ video playing against the spectacular view from the phone’s inbuilt camera, along with a sound file that may or may not contain the scream captured in the vacuum of space, although the members of CUSF are not holding their collective breath.
“Obviously, we’re not expecting to get much back, there may be some buzzing, but this is more about getting young people interested in satellites and acoustics, perhaps encouraging them to consider future study in science or engineering” said Edward Cunningham, a physics undergraduate at Churchill College and one of the members of CUSF.
With this in mind, the team is asking members of the public to submit their own screams for galactic transmission – by uploading a short ‘scream’ video to YouTube, and submitting their entry to www.screaminspace.com.
Each video must be at most ten seconds long, and there will be ten winning screams which can be voted for by the public on the project’s website. Screams must be entered before midnight on Sunday 4th November, after which the winning videos will be announced and loaded onto the phone in readiness for a launch before the end of this year.