Maybe Mainstream Jazz Isn't the Best Form for Deep-Space Sonification

If some signal from the other side of the universe can be assigned a numerical value, it can be translated into sound. Even better is when a bunch of signals—radio waves or gamma rays, for example—together describe something like a star’s magnetic field or the movements of a binary system. And then all of those signals can be translated into a whole system of sounds, with relationships between each tone corresponding to the whole or near-whole of a stellar phenomenon. Then you really have something.

This process is called sonification and it’s a bit loose. If you were to take all of those radio waves sailing across the universe and map them to some audible sound scheme, it should sound, well, cool, just by definition. But maybe not like music. Recent efforts have taken things a bit further, putting those sonifications in the hands of composers. One example is NASA fellow Robert Alexander, who Motherboard profiled earlier this year. Another is the Harvard-Smithsonian-based team of research associate Gerhard Sonnert, doctoral student Wanda Diaz-Merced, and composer Volkmar Studtrucker. Last week, the Harvard team published a new website dedicated to songifications of deep space.

The story’s pretty interesting: Diaz-Merced got into sonification after losing her sight as a physics student. With help from a program called xSonify, she was able to continue doing research. Instead of looking at numbers on a screen, Diaz-Merced could listen to them. Sonnert wanted to take the idea further: "I saw the musical notes on Wanda's desk and I got inspired," he says. Sonnert contacted the composer Studtrucker, who listened to the sonified EX Hydrae, a binary system consisting of a white dwarf and normal, healthy star. The composer selected some snippets of the stars’ atonal sonifications and built music out of them, carving out jazz and blues compositions from X-ray fluctuations.

The above-mentioned website is worth visiting, especially for hearing the raw product and its human composition back-to-back. That said, I have to note that there’s something disappointing in the music you’ll find; it’s just not very interesting to listen to. The melodies are alien enough, but something is missing. Maybe it’s too songified, or maybe mainstream jazz isn’t the appropriate form for the sounds of the infinite and the infinitely odd. I'd be much more interested in hearing what art-science duo Semiconductor might come up with.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.