If you've watched any World Cup games so far (and a record 15 million in the US watched Saturday's match versus Ghana, so statistically, ummm, 50,000 people in our audience have watched at least one) you may have heard an omnipresent buzzing sound and assumed it was a horde of mutant bees in the broadcast booth or a defect in your television.

It was neither.  Instead, it was a vuvuzela ("lepatata"), a B flat plastic horn that is loved by South African sports fans and hated by everyone else.  Seriously.  During that first World Cup match I watched it was so annoying I was convinced that if the people at Abu Gharaib had access to these things, terrorists would have caved in long ago.

While I'm busy building an instrument to convert the ionosphere to music, this NASA group has sonified the Sun. 

Astronomers at Univ. of Sheffield "found that huge magnetic loops that have been observed coiling away from the outer layer of the sun's atmosphere, known as coronal loops, vibrate like strings on a musical instrument. [...] Using satellite images of these loops, which can be over 60,000 miles long, the scientists were able to recreate the sound by turning the visible vibrations into noises and speeding up the frequency so it is audible to the human ear. "

"It is a sort of music as it has harmonics."

Sample this 18 second flare music: