What the sun sounds like

This story was originally covered by PRI’s Living on Earth. For more, listen to the audio above.

Solar winds are responsible for the Northern Lights or Aurora Borealis in the night sky. It’s essentially atmosphere from the sun as it expands into space. It’s also the inspiration for new music by composer and media artist Robert Alexander, who works with the Solar and Heliospheric Research Group at the University of Michigan to create music from data about solar winds.

The music uses data from the advanced composition explorer, the ACE spacecraft, that measures solar wind. Jason Gilbert, a research fellow in space science, told PRI’s Living on Earth, “It’s essentially a stream of numbers that are coming down, which give us information on the temperature, the density, the charged state of the atoms in the wind.”

Alexander translates that data into tribal-style beats (representing the rotation speed of the sun), cymbal-like crashes (helium velocity and density) and celestial sounding tones (carbon in different charged states). The sounds represent “the source of all life on Earth,” Alexander told Living on Earth. “It’s pretty humbling to have that as source material.”

The idea behind the music is more than just artistic, it’s also scientific. “We wondered if there was a chance that there were things in the data that we just weren’t seeing as we look at it visually,” Gilbert explained. “Perhaps there was some pattern or some artifact that we could hear audibly instead.”

Eventually, Gilbert hopes to turn the music into a tool for scientists. Gilbert envisions a graphical interface that scientists could manipulate and compare data. He says, “If we can make it an interactive tool like that, a researcher can use it find the science that they’re most interested in.”

The result has surprised everyone involved. When the researchers first heard the music, Gilbert says they were able to identify different events in the data. And hearing the music has changed people’s perceptions of the data. Gilbert says:

I think this is definitely given me a new appreciation for how things work out in space. You know, we can watch our satellites and see visually how the solar wind affects them and how this space weather affects them, but to hear it sort of gives it a new dimension, one that I hadn’t considered before. It’s opened my mind.

Hosted by Steve Curwood, “Living on Earth” is an award-winning environmental news program that delves into the leading issues affecting the world we inhabit. More “Living on Earth.”