The latest ScienceShot from Science magazine highlights another effort to convert measurements into sound.
This time the instruments are billions of miles away. Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have cosmic ray measuring instruments that take hourly measurements. Over 37 years the probes have collected over 320,000 measurements. That’s enough data to make a song.
And that’s what Domenico Vicinanza has done. The musician and physicist (or is he an engineer? Perhaps both.) Vicinanza has converted the measurements into notes (the larger the count, the higher the note) and prepared a song for piano and strings. Voyager 1 ‘plays’ piano and Voyager 2 handles the string parts.
This is not Vicinanza’s first effort. I noted (but did not name him) a collaboration of his in converting Higgs Boson data into music. He also works on a project recreating old instruments with the help of computer models.
Don’t forget to listen to the tune (scroll down).