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Blast the Horn to This Reggae Made from Stars

We’ve seen astronomers get trippy before, but never like this: a team at Georgia Tech’s Sonification Lab has converted data collected from a pair of stars by NASA’s Kepler into the six second melody looped above. Why? Well, because a band called Echo...

We’ve seen astronomers get trippy before, but never like this: a team at Georgia Tech’s Sonification Lab has converted data collected from a pair of stars by NASA’s Kepler into the six second melody looped above. Why? Well, because a band called Echo Movement requested it, of course. Welcome to the era of celestial reggae.

The lab first converted data from Kepler 4665989, a binary star whose light output fluctuates based upon the orbit of its companion star. “Those numerical values were loaded into our Sonification Sandbox software to create sequences of sonified musical pitches,” Riley Winton, the leader of the project, told MSNBC. “The process put us on the right track.”

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The Sonification Lab crew then cleaned up that raw sound and sent it to Echo Movement, which wrote a four-part harmony using the provided tones. Finally, the Georgia Tech group added sounds from another binary star to add tremolo and make the end result sound less synthetic. But, still, it’s a pretty thin jam. So, until, Echo Movement gets around to releasing a track, I suggest you add in some more instrumentals and the all-important reggae horn.

Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @derektmead.

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