With news of the confirmation of CERN's discovery of the Higgs boson particle still echoing around the world, researchers at Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe in Cambridge set to work on the sonification of the data. Put simply, this involves attaching a musical note to each bit of data so that the resulting melody is an auditory representation of the data gathered from the experiment that detected the Higgs boson particle.
Oddly enough, the melody has been described as sounding remarkably like the habanera (or Cuban contradanza), a popular form of dance music in the 19th century. Have a listen on Discovery.com.
It's hard to believe that something so complex as the so-called "God particle" could sound so simple. When we posted this to CBC Electronic's Facebook page, commenter Aaron Ball wasn't impressed: "not to be a grumpy troll, but quantization of a single dimension to scale discards so much of the informative content as to render the source meaningless. through the use of binaural stereo field, doeppler effects and pitch/timbre modulation, a slow motion auditory experience of this phenomena has the potential to be so much richer..." [sic].
Related:
Q&A with DJ Food on The Search Engine, the trippiest planetarium show since Laser Floyd
From DJing to performing live: The evolution of electronic music
The Solar System Set to Music: A Near-Perpetual Homage to Bach. (Via Exp.lore)
posted by
John Paolozzi
on Jul 10, 2012