Grateful Dead Percussionist Makes Music From Supernovas

At the "Cosmology At the Beach" conference earlier this month, Grammy-award winning percussionist Mickey Hart performed a composition inspired by the eruptions of supernovae. "Keith Jackson, a Berkeley Lab computer scientist who is also a musician, lent his talents to the project, starting with gathering data from astrophysicists like those at the Berkeley Lab’s Nearby Supernova Factory, which collects data from telescopes in space and on earth to quickly detect and analyze short-lived supernovas. 'If you think about it, it's all electromagnetic data — but with a very high frequency,' Jackson said of the raw data. "What we did is turn it into sound by slowing down the frequency and "stretching" it into an audio form. Both light and sound are all wave forms — just at different frequencies. Our goal was to turn the electromagnetic data into audio data while still preserving the science.'"

Comments

Not a new idea

[plate_o_shrimp]

Good for Mickey, but this idea isn't new. Isao Tomita (sort of) did the same thing in 1984 on "Dawn Chorus": http://www.isaotomita.net/recordings/dawn.html

Symphony of the Planets

[jDeepbeep]

Conceptually, this has been done before, with the planets of our solar system. I can only hope Mickey's turns out as well.

Re:Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

[chill]

Disaster Area, with the lead signer Hotblack Desiato spending a year dead for tax purposes.

Damn, that was funny stuff.

There are people in the U.K. willing to face the wrath of the power that be and ship over the CDs of all the radio dramas that the BBC did. Well worth the few extra $$.

Yet Another Frequency Shift

[DynaSoar]

There's no difference in this application than most of the others ever produced. They're all simply frequency shifted time series. Any pseudo-regular simple or complex wave can be sifted to any frequency. Radio-astronomy has been the biggest source so far, though brain recordings have been done. At this point about the only novel application would be taking recorded sound and shifting it up to visual light.

The application I've found that uses amplitude modulation (notes from data points rather than time series wave forms) is Moonbell http://wms.selene.jaxa.jp/selene_sok/about_en.html Musical notes are created from lunar altitude measurements done by Selene.

Re:Huh?

[mikael_j]

Actually, RobertLTux's reply was directed at the AC parent that read "How is this drummer so grateful if he's deceased?" and not zmollusc's post. Also, in a lot of places the Grateful Dead really are practically unknown (here in Sweden the most common reactions to any mention of the dead tend to be either "The what?" or "Oh, I think I heard one of their songs, they're one of those bands that sound like credence (clearwater revival), right?" and any attempts to actually explain further what the Grateful Dead were tends to end up with people assuming they sound like either The Beatles or Jimi Hendrix).

/Mikael