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 of ‘sonification’, we’re 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 – ‘sonifying’ ultra-high frequencies into sounds we can listen to.
It’s 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’s the skirling song that the ‘singing comet’ – otherwise known as 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko – performs out there in the dark watches of the interstellar medium, slowed down by a factor of 10,000 so we can hear it.
And, my favourite, the sounds of the magnetic field of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, picked up by the spacecraft Juno as it flew by in 2021 – a dizzying electronic dance track, a delirious music of the spheres. Sonification reveals that while soundwaves don’t travel through space, it isn’t silent out there. In fact, it’s a cacophony of high-frequency energy. You just have to know how to tune into it.
But as well as its scientific benefits – physicists know that hearing data produces insights that simply looking at a graph can’t, since the visceral embodiment of sound makes us aware of patterns and anomalies that visual representations don’t reveal so easily... There are musical wonders in listening to the sonified universe.
Sonification and classical music
Terry Riley uses the sounds of whistlers – surreal swoops of lightning interacting with the planets’ magnetic poles – throughout his cosmic musical journey Sun Rings, for the Kronos Quartet, choir and the sounds of the solar system. Riley plunges us far out from Earth in his 10-movement, 80-minute epic, as we’re taken to Jupiter and beyond with NASA’s library of sonification. His music gives us the gift of hearing the earth as the solar system does.
Yet even if composers aren’t directly working with solar system sonifications, what’s striking about the soundscapes for space that composers have conjured – like Kaija Saariaho’s Orion or Judith Weir’s Moon and Star – 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’s all-electronic score for the 1956 movie Forbidden Planet is a dizzyingly energetic soundscape that Jupiter’s Ganymede would be proud of.
Sonification... our contribution to the symphony of the universe
And when it’s 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.
