Illustration of music from space
Nationalgeogaphic.co.id – The beauty of the universe, with countless stars, galaxies and nebulae, has managed to captivate every eye that witnesses it. Not only witnessing the visuals, now our ears can also feel the melodious object!
Presumably this has confused our understanding so far. How can sound travel through a vacuum?
Kim Arcanda data visualization expert at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Cambridge, Massachusetts, has discovered a way to amplify and manipulate sound waves that the human ear cannot detect.
Arcand and his team use creative processing—taking data from optical, infrared, and X-ray telescopes, and assigning notes to the captured data—to render celestial phenomena through sound. It is this “sonification” that provides a new way for humans to experience amazing experiences.
For more than 20 years, Arcand has worked with colleagues at the Smithsonian, Harvard University, NASA, and the SYSTEM Sounds team from Canada. They have created a custom audio track to bring the sky pictures to life.
The songs can now be heard in the platform YouTube, side by side with the celestial images that inspired him. Now, the 16 sonifications and amplifications have been combined into an album titled Universal Harmonies, which will be available on CD, vinyl, and streaming platforms starting March 10.
As well as bringing science to a wider audience, Arcand also believes that sonification can support science itself by enabling more people to contribute to our understanding of the universe.
One of his goals, he said, was to show that “people who are blind or low-vision … can also be part of the scientific endeavour.”
For University of Toronto astrophysicist Matt Russo, who runs SYSTEM Sounds with musician Andrew Santaguida, sonification has been an opportunity to reconcile his two great interests—astronomy and music. Russo studied jazz guitar as an undergraduate at the University of Toronto before turning to astronomy.
“I was interested in rock, blues, Hendrix-type stuff,” he says. At SYSTEM Sounds, he says his mission is “simply to explore the universe through sound. It means converting all kinds of astronomical data so that they can be experienced auditory.”
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