Composer Sophie Kastner teamed up with researchers to develop versions of NASA telescope data that can actually be played by musicians. This pilot program is currently focusing on a small region at the center of our Milky Way galaxy where a supermassive black hole resides.
Why this region? NASA has telescope data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, Hubble Space Telescope, and now retired Spitzer Space Telescope, which spans about 400 light-years across. Computers then used algorithms to mathematically map the digital data from these telescopes to sounds that humans can perceive. We’d imagine Google’s MusicLM would generate something completely different-sounding if the right text prompt was inputted.
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I like to think of it as creating short vignettes of the data, and approaching it almost as if I was writing a film score for the image. I wanted to draw listener’s attention to smaller events in the greater data set,” said Sophie Kastner, a composer and vocalist located in Montreal.
