Spacecraft have been turned into musical instruments by a Cambridge boffin.
Domenico Vicinanza, who works for GÉANT, the pan-European data network serving 50 million research and education users, has sonifyied 36 years’ worth of NASA Voyager spacecraft data and converted it into a musical duet. Launched in 1977, both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are now decommissioned but still recording and sending live data to Earth.
They continue to traverse different parts of the universe, billions of kilometres apart. Voyager 1 left our solar system last year.
Domenico, who is Geant’s network services product manager, a trained musician as well as having a PhD in Physics, is also arts and humanities manager and has been exploring new ways of representing data and discovery through the use of high-speed networks.
“I wanted to compose a musical piece celebrating the Voyager 1 and 2, so I used the same measurements (proton counts from the cosmic ray detector over the last 37 years) from both spacecrafts, at the exactly same point of time, but at several billions of kms of distance one from the other,” he said.
“I used different groups of instruments and different sound textures to represent the two spacecrafts, synchronising the measurements taken at the same time.”
The result is an up-tempo string and piano orchestral piece. You can listen for yourself here:
To compose the spacecraft duet, 320,000 measurements were first selected from each spacecraft, at one hour intervals. Then that data was converted into two very long melodies, each comprising 320,000 notes using different sampling frequencies.
The result of the conversion into waveform, using such a big dataset, created a wide collection of audible sounds, lasting just a few seconds to a few hours.
While this project was created as a fun, accessible way to demonstrate the benefit of research and education networks to society, data sonification - representing data by means of sound signals – is increasingly used to accelerate scientific discovery; from epilepsy research to deep space discovery.
“Analysing the melody is exactly the same as looking at data in a spreadsheet, but using the ear,” Domenico said. “The information content is exactly the same: represented by regularities, patterns, changes, trends and peaks. In fact, data sonification makes it possible to get information about long-range regularities and correlations that are hard to spot just by inspection.”
European scientists are generating an ever-increasing amount of data, for instance at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, and in all data-driven scientific disciplines such as health and medicine, climate change, energy and food security.
GÉANT links researchers across Europe with a network which has a capacity of 100Gbps. When the terabit era arrives, the network can support up to 2Tbps.
Cambridge-based GÉANT is the infrastructure part funded by the European Commission to support many of Europe’s biggest science projects.