The sound of space: Voyager provides music from solar system and beyond

In space, no one can hear you scream – but the void isn’t quite as silent as you might think.

Cosmic particles populate the emptiness of space, and while they make no sound in the conventional sense, their speeding paths can be translated into sounds we can hear.

Now Domenico Vicinanza, a project manager at Géant – Europe’s high-speed data network that powers Cern and the Large Hadron Collider among other things – has taken 37 years of data sent back from deep space by Nasa’s Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts, and turned it into music.

A duet, separated by billions of kilometres

Vicinanza used 320,000 measurements collected at one-hour intervals by the cosmic ray detector aboard each spacecraft to build a musical piece, tying different detections to different frequencies of note.

Different groups of instruments and sound textures were used to given each of the two different spacecraft - which are separated by billions of kilometres of space – a unique musical voice producing a duet from deep space.

“I wanted to compose a musical piece celebrating the Voyager 1 and 2 together, so used the same measurements (proton counts from the cosmic ray detector over the last 37 years) from both spacecrafts, at the exactly same point of time, but at several billions of kilometres of distance one from the other,” said Vicinanza, who is trained musician with a doctorate in Physics.

The result of this “data sonification” is an up-tempo string and piano orchestral piece.

But there is a serious side to the manipulation of data into audible melodies.

“Analysing the melody is exactly the same as looking at data in a spreadsheet, but using the ear,” explained Vicinanza. “The information content is exactly the same: represented by regularities, patterns, changes, trends and peaks.”

Data sonification is used to spot trends, correlations and long-range regularities in data that are difficult to identify by looking at the numbers but are much easier to listen out for.

Data from the Large Hadron Collider, for instance, was turned into sound by the LHCSound project as part of an outreach initiative to the public, while the International Community for Auditory Display has been hosting conferences focused on auditory analysis of data since 1992.