CERN’s “Cosmic Piano” Makes Music Out of Raw Particle Data

At Switzerland’sMontreux Jazz Festivalin July , jazz pianist Al Blatter found himself jam with an strange collaborator : the so - call “ cosmic forte-piano , ” an cat’s-paw recrudesce by physicist at CERN that bank on data return by cosmic ray to make beautiful music . Whenever a particle travel by through a demodulator tablet on the instrument , the issue is a musical bank note and a flash of illumination .

It ’s the late creative use by particle physicist ( among others ) of sonification , the process by which raw data isconverted into sound . In the past times , musichas been generated using datafrom the ring of Saturn , the Northern lights , the solar twist , the cosmic microwave background radiation sickness , infrasonic “ vox ” of volcano , and black hole , to quote just a few . A few year ago , British composer Alexis Kirkecreated a duetbetween a live fiddler and the radioactive subatomic particles produced inside a cloud chamber . NASA ’s latest endeavor is astreaming cyberspace radio broadcast — where you could mind to thelive sonification of raw data — called CRaTER ( Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation ) , constantly converting data from its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter into medicine .

Last year , to mark its sixtieth anniversary , CERN showcased theLHCChamber Music project , in which scientist — play harp , guitar , two violin , a keyboard , a clarinet , and a flute — perform a compositionby Domenico Vicinanza , base on data from the four major experimentation at the Large Hadron Collider . ( Vicinanza previously composed a slice imbibe from the data that helped physicist name the Higgs boson , as well as gaussmeter readings from the Voyager commission . ) .

CERN ’s cosmic piano is the brainchild of physicist Arturo Fernandez and his collaborator Guillermo Tejeda , using constituent from the ALICE experiment to build it . According to Physics World , the instrument looks “ a bit like a fancy staircase ” and sounds like R2 - D2 . And it ’s proved so popular that several such instrument have been sold since it debuted at a CERN open house in 2013 . ( Retail price : around $ 2500 . )

So how did the Montreux fete performance go ? As freewheel polyrhythmic jam school term go , pretty well , despite the challenges the musicians face judge to equal the transonic outpourings of random cosmic rays . As CERN physicist Steven Goldfarb puts it in the video below , “ The cosmos does n’t really have much of a rhythm method of birth control . ”

[ ViaPhysics WorldandCERN . ]

Starship Test 9