Want to hear the wonder of deep space? This music is made from NASA’s telescope data | 24CA News

Music can usually transport you to a different time and place. But now a Montreal composer is bringing listeners far out into the cosmos with a bit of music created from NASA’s knowledge on the Milky Way.

“At the end of the piece, especially … I’m focusing in on the black hole that’s at the centre of the galaxy. And you get this feeling of stars spiralling toward the centre,” mentioned Sophie Kastner, composer of Where Parallel Lines Converge.

“I wanted to have all of these pingy, like, high textures that are just, like, continuously spiralling,” she instructed The Current’s Matt Galloway.

Kastner’s piece is not simply an artist’s impression. Her music was generated from the kind of knowledge NASA scientists often use to create beautiful visible pictures of deep area. In reality, the identical knowledge was used to create a picture of the centre of the Milky Way, which Kastner additionally used for inspiration.

WATCH | Where Parallel Lines Converge, a symphony from the celebrities

The completed piece makes use of knowledge from the Hubble, Chandra and Spitzer telescopes, in a composition performed on as much as seven devices. She selected a glockenspiel and violin to convey that motion and sense of spiralling for the black gap; and decrease, rougher timbre devices just like the bass clarinet and cello to seize that sense of thriller that comes with gazing into area.

Kastner labored with scientist Kimberly Arcand, an knowledgeable in creating these visualizations.

“We’re just taking the image and mathematically mapping it, taking those pixels and translating them into something you can hear instead,” mentioned Arcand, a visualization scientist at NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

Arcand defined that the info from deep-space telescopes begins out as 1s and 0s earlier than being analyzed and compiled into tables of knowledge. Those particulars embody issues like the quantity of vitality, or places of photons — particles of sunshine — hitting the telescope, she mentioned.

NASA has experimented with creating easy audio representations earlier than, with an information sonification undertaking known as the Universe of Sound. Kastner was initially requested to show these soundscapes into sheet music, in order that they’d be simply out there for musicians.

“I slowly realized there was so much more of a story to tell with the image … and that there was really a composition there … there was a whole piece of music,” she mentioned.

For Arcand, getting to listen to knowledge translated into a complicated piece of music was one thing new.

“I almost fell out of my chair, it was so beautiful,” she mentioned.

“It makes me think of the data differently; it makes me process it differently and I really appreciate that.”

Making that means from a chaotic cosmos

Arcand mentioned the concept of turning uncooked knowledge into sound initially got here from her colleague Wanda Diaz, an astronomer who developed the novel method after she misplaced her sight early in her profession.

That concept grew into the Universe of Sound, a undertaking to make understanding area extra accessible, whereas additionally creating stunning starscapes of sound. 

One of the outcomes is Galactic Center Sonification, a brief soundscape primarily based on the identical picture of the centre of the Milky Way that Kastner labored with. 

WATCH | Tuning in to the center of the Milky Way  

“[What you can hear is] a beautiful sort of sweep across an image of the inner, say, 400 light years of our Milky Way,” Arcand mentioned.

“It’s kind of like the downtown region, where there’s black holes and little explosions and lots of stars. And you’re hearing us translate those pixels into sound.”

For Arcand, it was essential that the musical selections made sense with the scientific information of the picture — notably for such a busy a part of our galaxy. 

“It’s like Times Square. There’s all of this stuff happening. It’s so energetic,” she mentioned. 

“In order for our human brains to make meaning from these sounds, we need to make sure that it’s both distinct enough in sound, but also that they combine well together,” she mentioned.

Kastner mentioned the undertaking made her understand her work as an artist is not so far-off from the sphere of science.

“As humans, we’re always trying to make sense of the world, and one of the ways we make sense of the world is through art,” she mentioned.

“So why shouldn’t science and art be connected?”