{"id":47040,"date":"2024-09-01T10:30:00","date_gmt":"2024-09-01T08:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/09faa354-21a2-4dc6-86f7-9fcc5548de41"},"modified":"2024-09-01T11:07:14","modified_gmt":"2024-09-01T09:07:14","slug":"sonification-electromagnetic-music-that-can-help-us-understand-the-secrets-of-the-universe","status":"publish","type":"rss_feed","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/rss_feed\/sonification-electromagnetic-music-that-can-help-us-understand-the-secrets-of-the-universe\/","title":{"rendered":"Sonification: electromagnetic ‘music’ that can help us understand the secrets of the universe"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By <\/p>

Published: Sunday, 01 September 2024 at 08:30 AM<\/p>

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Read on to understand sonification, the art of translating electromagnetic waves into sounds that humans can use to understand the universe…<\/strong><\/p>

What is sonification?<\/h2>
How can you travel to the stars, not by building a rocketship to Mars but instead… by listening? Thanks to the art of \u2018sonification\u2019, we\u2019re all interstellar travellers. This is the tool that scientists and musicians use to translate the electromagnetic and radio waves of the universe into the range of human hearing \u2013 \u2018sonifying\u2019 ultra-high frequencies into sounds we can listen to.\u00a0<\/p>
5 of the best pieces inspired by space<\/a><\/strong><\/li><\/ul>
It\u2019s thanks to sonification that we can hear the otherworldly revolutions of pulsars, the clicks and whoops of jaw-droppingly dense neutron stars, hundreds and thousands of light years away. Or there\u2019s the skirling song that the \u2018singing comet\u2019 \u2013 otherwise known as 67P\/Churyumov-Gerasimenko \u2013 performs out there in the dark watches of the interstellar medium, slowed down by a factor of 10,000 so we can hear it. <\/p>
<\/div><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">67P\/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the ‘singing comet’<\/figcaption><\/figure>And, my favourite, the sounds of the magnetic field of Jupiter\u2019s moon Ganymede, picked up by the spacecraft Juno as it flew by in 2021 \u2013 a dizzying electronic dance track, a delirious music of the spheres. Sonification reveals that while soundwaves don\u2019t travel through space, it isn\u2019t silent out there. In fact, it\u2019s a cacophony of high-frequency energy. You just have to know how to\u00a0tune\u00a0into\u00a0it.<\/p><ul><li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.classical-music.com\/features\/recordings\/best-recordings-holsts-planets\">Holst’s The Planets: a guide to the cosmic work and its best recordings<\/a><\/strong><\/li><\/ul>But as well as its scientific benefits \u2013 physicists know that hearing data produces insights that simply looking at a graph can\u2019t, since the visceral embodiment of sound makes us aware of patterns and anomalies that visual representations don\u2019t reveal so easily… There are musical wonders in listening to the sonified universe.<\/p><ul><li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.classical-music.com\/articles\/nine-best-pieces-music-inspired-science\">9 of the best pieces inspired by science<\/a><\/strong><\/li><\/ul><h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-sonification-and-classical-music\">Sonification and classical music<\/h2>Terry Riley uses the sounds of whistlers \u2013 surreal swoops of lightning interacting with the planets\u2019 magnetic poles \u2013 throughout his cosmic musical journey Sun Rings<\/em>, for the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.classical-music.com\/features\/artists\/kronos-quartet\">Kronos Quartet<\/a><\/strong>, choir and the sounds of the solar system. Riley plunges us far out from Earth in his 10-movement, 80-minute epic, as we\u2019re taken to Jupiter and beyond with <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nasa.gov\">NASA<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s library of sonification. His music gives us the gift of hearing the earth as the solar\u00a0system\u00a0does.<\/p><figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Kronos Quartet - Terry Riley's Sun Rings\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/D3qqhOgNdhQ?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen=\"\"\/><\/div><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The Kronos Quartet performs Terry Riley’s Sun Rings<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>Yet even if composers aren\u2019t directly working with solar system sonifications, what\u2019s striking about the soundscapes for space that composers have conjured \u2013 like <a href=\"https:\/\/www.classical-music.com\/news\/composer-kaija-saariaho-has-died-aged-70\">Kaija Saariaho<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s Orion<\/em> or <a href=\"https:\/\/www.classical-music.com\/features\/artists\/interview-composer-judith-weir\">Judith Weir<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s Moon and Star<\/em> \u2013 is how close they come to the extremes of sonification: abysses of high and low, pulses that are both rhythmic and out of time. Even more presciently, Bebe and Louis Barron\u2019s all-electronic score for the 1956 movie Forbidden Planet<\/em> is a dizzyingly energetic soundscape that Jupiter\u2019s Ganymede would be proud of.\u00a0<\/p><ul><li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.classical-music.com\/articles\/kaija-saariaho-best-works\">Kaija Saariaho: 6 of her best works<\/a><\/strong><\/li><\/ul><h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-sonification-our-contribution-to-the-symphony-of-the-universe\">Sonification… our contribution to the symphony of the universe<\/h2>And when it\u2019s turned into radio waves on broadcast and in recordings, the energy of this human-made music goes out there, beyond our atmosphere, to become another layer in the teeming frequencies of the universe: the human-composed music of the spheres.\u00a0<\/p><ul><li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.classical-music.com\/articles\/guide-strausss-also-sprach-zarathustra\">A guide to Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra<\/em> – the iconic music used in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/li><\/ul> <\/body><\/html>\n<hr class=\"no-tts wp-block-separator\"\/>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Published: Sunday, 01 September 2024 at 08:30 AM Read on to understand sonification, the art of translating electromagnetic waves into sounds that humans can use to understand the universe… What is sonification? How can you travel to the stars, not by building a rocketship to Mars but instead… by listening? Thanks to the art […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":47041,"template":"","categories":[1],"acf":{"readingTimeMinutes":"3"},"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2024\/09\/sonification-electromagnetic-music-that-can-help-us-understand-the-secrets-of-the-universe.jpg",1200,800,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2024\/09\/sonification-electromagnetic-music-that-can-help-us-understand-the-secrets-of-the-universe-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2024\/09\/sonification-electromagnetic-music-that-can-help-us-understand-the-secrets-of-the-universe-300x200.jpg",300,200,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2024\/09\/sonification-electromagnetic-music-that-can-help-us-understand-the-secrets-of-the-universe-768x512.jpg",768,512,true],"large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2024\/09\/sonification-electromagnetic-music-that-can-help-us-understand-the-secrets-of-the-universe-1024x683.jpg",800,534,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2024\/09\/sonification-electromagnetic-music-that-can-help-us-understand-the-secrets-of-the-universe.jpg",1200,800,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2024\/09\/sonification-electromagnetic-music-that-can-help-us-understand-the-secrets-of-the-universe.jpg",1200,800,false]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"importmanagerhub@sprylab.com","author_link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/author\/importmanagerhubsprylab-com\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"By Published: Sunday, 01 September 2024 at 08:30 AM Read on to understand sonification, the art of translating electromagnetic waves into sounds that humans can use to understand the universe… What is sonification? How can you travel to the stars, not by building a rocketship to Mars but instead… by listening? Thanks to the art…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed\/47040"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/rss_feed"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}