A sonification of the Milky Way galaxy's core has been turned into sheet music. Find out how it was done.
Credit: NASA/CXC/A. Jubett
Credit: NASA/CXC/A. Jubett
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00:01The Universe of Sound Data Sonification Project, it's all about taking NASA data, NASA images, and translating them into something that you can hear.
00:09This is done through a mathematical mapping, where we're taking the pixels and just translating them into different kinds of soundbeds.
00:18My name is Dr. Kimberly Arkand, and I'm a visualization scientist for NASA's Chandricks Observatory at the Center for Astrophysics.
00:25I'm Sophie Kastner, and I'm a composer, and I wrote the piece Where Parallel Lines Converge.
00:31My piece centers around the idea of spiraling.
00:34I'm always kind of looking for new things that we can try, new ways to understand things, new ways to process information.
00:41The initial plan was to take the original sonifications and translate them as accurately as possible into pieces to be played by musicians.
00:50When Sophie came into this project as a professional composer, she really brought a unique perspective.
00:59To me, it just seemed like this brilliant idea of converting data to sound, not only for visually impaired people who then can appreciate these images that they can't necessarily see,
01:08but also as a supplemental tool for someone who's looking at the image who can then hear it.
01:13It was different once I started thinking about it from a composer's point of view.
01:16All of these objects seem so unknowable, so it's incredible to me that we have these opportunities to bring those objects down to Earth, to help make them knowable.
01:28It is this idea of capturing light that's been traveling to us, translating scientific information into something we can perceive,
01:35something we can understand, something we can learn from.
01:37It's been such a pleasure to work with Sophie as she works through this idea of translating a translation into something that can be played.
02:00Paying attention to the NASA data, being authentic to the scientific story, but bringing it down into the sphere of human-playable sounds.
02:11What she very smartly and adeptly did was focus on moments in the data that would make it a bit more bite-sized for an ensemble to play.
02:19The significant sections of the image where there's a real cool story to tell, and a cool soundbed to make from that story.
02:30I was working with an ensemble of about seven musicians.
02:39I can't necessarily do this in the same way.
02:43Taking the data and incorporating computer software,
02:47okay, let me use the similar process to what the original sonifications did,
02:52but add my own spin to it, because I also wanted to make it a piece of music suited to the instruments I was working with.
02:59To me, that's just a wonderful melding of science and art.
03:04The concept of using data and then translating it directly to sound was a really interesting idea to me.
03:11There's this huge emotional layer to looking at these images of space.
03:17Oh my god, I'm so small in comparison to this vast object.
03:21It's such a large feeling to have.
03:26I wanted to dig into those emotions.
03:28When you're talking about things like gamma ray bursts, blazars, quasars, black holes,
03:36like all of these things sound too incredible to really understand, to have a personal connection to,
03:43but sound or music, you can.
03:46You can have a personal connection.
03:47The galactic center, this sort of inner 400 light year region around Sagittarius A star,
04:03our very own supermassive black hole.
04:05It's this wonderful, dense, busy, active, downtown region of the Milky Way.
04:11There's exploding stars.
04:12There are these x-ray binaries.
04:14There are these beautiful loops of material, all these massive stars.
04:18There's so much going on.
04:20The infrared data is mapped to a soft piano.
04:24The Hubble data is mapped to a plucky violin.
04:27And then the Chandra data is mapped to this sort of glockenspiel xylophone sound.
04:33Each of those sounds are very distinct.
04:35So as you scan, you sort of hear that soft, cooler gas and dust from Spitzer and that beautiful piano.
04:42But then Hubble's violin comes in, and you can very clearly hear those very plucky moments
04:48of these gorgeous extended arches.
04:50And then as you get over toward Sagittarius A star, that monster of a black hole,
04:55you hear this little crescendo of high energy from Chandra.
05:00Humans and computers are different, obviously, and humans have limitations in terms of what
05:08they can play, what they can read.
05:11The music has to be legible to musicians.
05:16I didn't have the tools of, like, an entire orchestra of strings.
05:20You know, I have two string instruments.
05:21And I think the two string instruments I have, they can make so many different types of beautiful sounds
05:28that are more than just a pizzicato.
05:34Extra Light would correspond with a very pure high-pitched tone.
05:39I kind of worked in that way, where I categorized sounds that I had available to me.
05:47I corresponded them with parameters directly from the NASA data and directly from the original
05:53sonifications.
05:56I picked specifically the flute because it can play so high, but also because it has so many
06:03different textures and timbres that it can make.
06:06I decided to use the clarinet because I can also have that instrument doubling bass clarinet,
06:15which gives me this huge registral range.
06:18I really wanted to have percussion instruments because there are so many different kinds of
06:27sounds you can make with percussion instruments, especially the mallet instruments, like the
06:31glockenspiel and the crotalis and the marimba, where, you know, it has a huge range, but it
06:37also has these really high, beautiful, like, pingy, pure tones.
06:42And they're very celestial in sound, and the original sonifications also use a lot of
06:48glockenspiel, so I wanted to kind of harken back to that a little bit and use the glockenspiel and the
06:53crotalis, which have these really beautiful pure tones to connote this celestial sound.
06:59You really hear this at the end of the piece. I have this whole section where it's zooming
07:05in towards the Sagittarius A star, and you hear all of these repetitive, pingy, high textural sounds
07:13in the glockenspiel and the crotalis and the piano. And I really just wanted to convey this sense of
07:19vastness and also of just how many stars there are. They're all overlapping on each other, and you can't
07:26even count them anymore.
07:34I don't think of these pixels, these photons, in the same way anymore.
07:40I learned so much about space that I didn't know at all.
07:44What else can we do to make this processing of our data more interesting, more fun, more
07:50experiential? I'm all for new ways of knowing.