Musica mundana update, June 2010 

Two excellent stories to which I was alerted this morning by NPR, which unfortunately used them as a cutesy segue into a feature on the “real music” of some boring singer/songwriter.

First, physicists at CERN in Geneva are “sonifying” the data from their experiments with the Large Hadron Collider in order to render perceptible these microcosmic interactions— and perhaps, to better understand them.  The project, entited “LHC Sound,” is a collaboration between CERN and a group of physicists, musicians, and artists in London.  Unfortunately, this “particle music” sounds a lot like second-rate computer music circa 1998.  Nonetheless, intriguing work.

The Large Hadron Collider. Is it a coincidence it looks like the Pompidou Center?

Second, scientists at the University of Sheffield in England have recently used satellite images of the vast “coronal loops” shot off by the sun to measure the frequency of their vibrations and transpose the result into the range of human hearing.  The scientists studying these phenomena say that the magnetic disturbances sometimes behave like a plucked guitar string (transverse waves), in other cases like air through a wind instrument (longitudinal waves).  Analysis of the sounds is being used to prepare for an anticipated “space storm” in 2013.

I find it fascinating that virtually all of the “nature music” discovered in recent years— whether microcosmic or macrocosmic— sounds like post-1950 experimental electronica.  Is nature imitating art here, or vice versa?

June 25, 2010, 11:06am