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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.'"
Gives a new meaning to "Drums > Space".
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In a way, what he's doing isn't all that much different from when scientists take pictures of celestial phenomena in the non-visible spectra (X-Ray, IR, etc.) and then "project" them into the visual spectrum so we can actually see what they've photographed. To some extent it's a distortion of reality, but interesting.
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
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