The Earthian Hivemind

Bosons and X-Rays – Hear the sound of natural particles

Steph P. Bianchini

/

I have posted a while ago something about the music of space – ie, the eerie sounds celestial bodies make when translated into plasma waves. music615

Today we have a different category of… artists: sub-atomic particles, and the amazing symphonies a gifted musician can create with them. I have written about how this happens from a scientific point of view in this article. Here, you can simply enjoy the tunes.

The first one is from LHC, and the Higgs boson – that magic particle thought to give all others mass, thus making matter possible:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPmQcviT-R4#t=637]

 

The second is from gamma-rays captured by Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT). Their bursts of high-frequency electromagnetic radiations are the brightest events known to occur in the universe.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wvPe9OA1qA]

 

Then, to finish with a really spooky one,  this is a NASA animation zooming in on a black hole. The waves coming from it are X-ray data from the object GRS 1915+105 (V1487 Aquilae). It is a X-ray binary star system, featuring a regular star and a black hole. A MIT scientist has translated its X-rays generated by the shedding of its accretion disk into audible sounds. Wow.

Tags:

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

3 responses to “Bosons and X-Rays – Hear the sound of natural particles”

  1. calmgrove Avatar
    calmgrove

    Interesting concept, sonification, and one which as a musician I heartily endorse. A couple or so points occur to me. One is that no-one seems to have used the phrase Music of the Spheres; even if the old geocentric idea of concentric spheres went out with the ark it seems vaguely apt for the LHC (admittedly not a sphere but a circular tube, in effect).

    Second, I’m not clear about the process involved in composing the LHChamber music. It sounded wonderfully tonal and also minimalist but what were the criteria in using what to my ears sounded limited to the white notes on the piano? The resulting music was a little like twelve-tone compositions but only using seven notes.

    And third, other musical elements were ill-defined — pitch range, articulation, duration, amplitude for example. Still, the composition (and the other synthesized sound sources in the other musical examples) was strangely mesmerising and contemplative, a point I think was mentioned — even when it was coming across as more atonal or aleatoric.

    Reply
    1. Stephen P. Bianchini Avatar
      Stephen P. Bianchini

      Hello, thanks for this! Good to have an expert opinion. I cannot help for the musical part itself being not one myself, but for the LHChamber you may want to
      check this one http://lhcopensymphony.wordpress.com/the-first-higgs-boson-data-sonifcation/. It is the blog of Vicinanza, the physicist-musician that has done the job. Sure you will understand more than I do – I’m better with equations 🙂

      Reply
      1. calmgrove Avatar
        calmgrove

        Thanks very much for the link! I’ll go explore that soon.

        Reply