How A Galactic Center Sonification Was Turned Into Sheet Music
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
Transcript
00:00 The Universe of Sound Data Sonification Project, it's all about taking NASA data, NASA images,
00:07 and translating them into something that you can hear.
00:09 This is done through mathematical mapping, where we're taking the pixels and just translating
00:14 them into different kinds of sound beds.
00:18 My name is Dr. Kimberly Arcand, and I'm a visualization scientist for NASA's Chandra
00:22 Exo-Observatory at the Center for Astrophysics.
00:25 I'm Sophie Kastner, and I'm a composer, and I wrote the piece "Where Parallel Lines Converge."
00:31 My piece centers around the idea of spiraling.
00:33 I'm always kind of looking for new things that we can try, new ways to understand things,
00:39 new ways to process information.
00:41 The initial plan was to take the original sonifications and translate them as accurately
00:46 as possible into pieces to be played by musicians.
00:52 When Sophie came into this project as a professional composer, she really brought a unique perspective.
00:59 To me it just seemed like this brilliant idea of converting data to sound, not only for
01:04 visually impaired people who then can appreciate these images that they can't necessarily see,
01:08 but also as a supplemental tool for someone who's looking at the image who can then hear
01:12 it.
01:13 It was different once I started thinking about it from a composer's point of view.
01:17 All of these objects seem so unknowable.
01:21 So it's incredible to me that we have these opportunities to bring those objects down
01:25 to Earth to help make them knowable.
01:28 It is this idea of capturing light that's been traveling to us, translating scientific
01:32 information into something we can perceive, something we can understand, something we
01:37 can learn from.
01:39 The title "Where Parallel Lines Converge" came from a poem that I read by Sarah Howe.
01:44 "It predicts black holes where parallel lines will meet, whose stark horizon, even starlight,
01:50 bent in its tracks, can't resist."
01:52 It's been such a pleasure to work with Sophie as she works through this idea of translating
01:57 a translation into something that can be played, paying attention to the NASA data, being authentic
02:03 to the scientific story, but bringing it down into the sphere of human playable sounds.
02:11 What she very smartly and adeptly did was focus on moments in the data that would make
02:16 it a bit more bite-sized for an ensemble to play.
02:19 These significant sections of the image where there's a real cool story to tell and a cool
02:24 soundbed to make from that story.
02:35 I was working with an ensemble of about seven musicians.
02:39 I can't necessarily do this in the same way.
02:43 Taking the data and incorporating computer software, okay, let me use the similar process
02:50 to what the original sonifications did, but add my own spin to it because I also wanted
02:55 to make it a piece of music suited to the instruments I was working with.
03:00 To me, that's just a wonderful melding of science and art.
03:05 The concept of using data and then translating it directly to sound was a really interesting
03:10 idea to me.
03:12 There's this huge emotional layer to looking at these images of space.
03:17 Oh my God, I'm so small in comparison to this vast object.
03:23 It's such a large feeling to have.
03:26 I wanted to dig into those emotions.
03:32 When you're talking about things like gamma-ray bursts, blazars, quasars, black holes, like
03:36 all of these things sound too incredible to really understand, to have a personal connection
03:42 to, but sound or music, you can.
03:46 You can have a personal connection.
03:58 The galactic center, this sort of inner 400 light year region around Sagittarius A*, our
04:03 very own supermassive black hole, it's this wonderful, dense, busy, active downtown region
04:10 of the Milky Way.
04:11 There's exploding stars, there are these X-ray binaries, there are these beautiful loops
04:16 of material, all these massive stars.
04:19 There's so much going on.
04:21 The infrared data is mapped to a soft piano.
04:24 The Hubble data is mapped to a plucky violin.
04:28 And then the Chandra data is mapped to this sort of glockenspiel xylophone sound.
04:33 Each of those sounds are very distinct.
04:35 So as you scan, you sort of hear that soft, cooler gas and dust from Spitzer and that
04:41 beautiful piano.
04:42 But then Hubble's violin comes in and you can very clearly hear those very plucky moments
04:48 of these gorgeous extended arches.
04:51 And then as you get over toward Sagittarius A*, that monster of a black hole, you hear
04:56 this little crescendo of high energy from Chandra.
05:01 Humans and computers are different, obviously, and humans have limitations in terms of what
05:08 they can play, what they can read.
05:12 The music has to be legible to musicians.
05:17 I didn't have the tools of like an entire orchestra of strings.
05:20 You know, I have two string instruments.
05:22 And I think the two string instruments I have, they can make so many different types of beautiful
05:28 sounds that are more than just a pizzicato.
05:34 X-ray light would correspond with a very pure, high pitched tone.
05:42 I kind of worked in that way where I categorized sounds that I had available to me.
05:47 I corresponded them with parameters directly from the NASA data and directly from the original
05:53 sonifications.
05:57 I picked specifically the flute because it can play so high, but also because it has
06:02 so many different textures and timbres that it can make.
06:10 I decided to use the clarinet because I can also have that instrument doubling bass clarinet,
06:15 which gives me this huge registral range.
06:23 I really wanted to have percussion instruments because there are so many different kinds
06:27 of sounds you can make with percussion instruments, especially the mallet instruments like the
06:31 glockenspiel and the crotales and the marimba, where it has a huge range, but it also has
06:38 these really high, beautiful, like pingy, pure tones.
06:43 They're very celestial in sound.
06:46 The original sonifications also use a lot of glockenspiel, so I wanted to kind of harken
06:50 back to that a little bit and use the glockenspiel and the crotales, which have these really
06:55 beautiful, pure tones to connote this celestial sound.
07:00 You really hear this at the end of the piece.
07:02 I have this whole section where it's zooming in towards the Sagittarius A star and you
07:07 hear all of these repetitive, pingy, high textural sounds in the glockenspiel and the
07:14 crotales and the piano.
07:16 And I really just wanted to convey this sense of vastness and also of just how many stars
07:23 there are.
07:24 They're all overlapping around each other and you can't even count them anymore.
07:34 I don't think of these pixels, these photons, in the same way anymore.
07:40 I learned so much about space that I didn't know at all.
07:45 What else can we do to make this processing of our data more interesting, more fun, more
07:50 experiential?
07:51 I'm all for new ways of knowing.