We didn’t know this, but for years, scientists have been taking their data and making music with it. Over at Eos, Kimberly Cartier has collected several examples of this work: glacier soundscapes, percussive orbits of an exoplanet system, harp and drum set to Saturn’s rings, synthesized earthquakes, and global temperature chamber music.
But that’s not all. Other examples include:
Dan Howarth at de zeen once posted about Nigel Stanford’s music video involving sound wave experiments:
Grateful Dead percussionist Mickey Hart worked with scientists on the 2013 film Rhythms of the Universe (watch the talk accompanying the film), for which Earth and planetary data was used to create the music.
NPR interviewed a sonification specialist who created a symphony based on solar data.
The exoplanet system music deserves an extra mention: we can “play” the TRAPPIST-1 system with an awesome Björk-like web app from SYSTEM Sounds:
Any more cool examples? Feel free to list them in the comments.
Related: NASA posted a trove of space sounds for download and ESA shared the song of a comet.
Note: We came back to this post in April 2021 and embedded a video.
