It’s a widely known fact that there’s no sound in space, however, a NASA project is proving otherwise by transforming images of space objects into magical music. It is a part of a “sonification” project by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Universe of Learning program, as per a NASA blog.
The project captures normal charts and images of the cosmos and turns them into sound. One of the recent examples of this shows what the remnants of the Tycho supernova sound like – and it’s just magical. While it’s still true that sound can’t travel in space, though it is possible to arrange acoustic data from stars.
Making music from dead stars
To capture “sounds” then, researchers at the agency’s Universe of Learning program uses software that processes images and turns the visual data into sonic information. For instance, the Tycho supernova image is processed from the center moving outward.
The different colors of the supernova are considered different notes, while the image’s brightness determines how loud it is. “The sonification aligns with those colors as the redder light produces the lowest notes and blue and violet create the higher-pitched notes,” the blog post described.
Another good example of data sonification that was released recently by the project takes a different approach. This image is a composite from Hubble and Chandra data and shows a region where stars form known as Westerlund 2.
Churning music from odd things
For this image, the sound travels from left to right across the cluster. The Hubble data is shown with strings while the data from Chandra is shown by bells. The pitch of the notes is determined by their vertical position on the image.
Similarly, a team of researchers from MIT created music by translating the structure of a spider web. During the study, the researchers scanned a natural spider web with a laser to capture 2D cross-sections. They reconstructed the web’s 3D network with help of computer algorithms. Every strand of the web was assigned a different frequency of sound, enabling them to create notes that were later combined in patterns based on the web’s 3D structure and create melodies.
