Music & Culture

NASA puts the sounds of the universe into a new album

10:43am March 06, 2023

Space

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What if, instead of seeing the universe as an explosion of light, we could hear it? That's where Kimberly Arcand, a visualization scientist and emerging tech lead for NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory, comes in. She's part of NASA's Sonification Project, an effort to turn data gathered from the universe into sounds, in part as a way to allow visually impaired people to experience the depths of our galaxy.

"With excellent math," says Arcand, explaining their work on the high-pressure interplay between a supermassive black hole and the hot gas surrounding it, "you can figure out that [the pressure is] essentially a B-flat, about 57 octaves below middle C."

The result of their research: a new album, titled Universal Harmonies, with a beauty all its own. It's out March 10.

To hear this conversation and samples from the album, use the audio player at the top of this page.

Transcript

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

And finally today, what if, instead of seeing the universe as an explosion of light, we heard it? What would that sound like? Kimberly Arcand is a visualization scientist and emerging tech lead for NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. She's part of NASA's sonification project. It's an effort to turn data collected from the outer reaches of the universe into sounds. The idea is to allow visually impaired people to experience the galaxy. But the result, a collection of 16 of these interpretations, is an album with a beauty all its own.

KIMBERLY ARCAND: This piece is really exciting for me because this is a result of a black hole that we - we're looking back in, like, 2003. And a colleague had come out with this fantastic research work showing that it was emanating, like, the deepest sound in the universe.

(SOUNDBITE OF BLACK HOLE)

ARCAND: There's a very supermassive black hole at the center of this cluster of galaxies, and there's all of this hot gas surrounding it. And that black hole is kind of, like, burping out into that surrounding gas and stuff. And that's causing these pressure waves, which are sound waves. And with excellent math, you can figure out that it's essentially a B-flat, about 57 octaves below middle C. This sonification, which is just a translation of data into sound, is taking that note that's out there in the universe that's too far away for us to hear and too deep, and we're taking it and resonifying it - so bringing it up into the octaves that humans can hear in, which I think was really pretty exciting.

(SOUNDBITE OF BLACK HOLE)

ARCAND: So the sonification project actually began because of the pandemic.

(SOUNDBITE OF CHANDRA LABS' "M87, IN MULTIWAVELENGTH LIGHT")

ARCAND: You're separated from your community members, your colleagues. And for me, the idea of the sonification project was essentially a way to keep working with colleagues and community partners who are blind or low vision. And this was a way to sort of reach across the distances - I guess pun intended - but still the distances that have been created during the pandemic.

(SOUNDBITE OF CHANDRA LABS' "M87, IN MULTIWAVELENGTH LIGHT")

ARCAND: X-ray light is not naturally perceivable to humans, right? We can't see them with human eyes. We can't experience them unless we do a process of translation. So most of my work has been about translating it into images. And I just realized after a few years of that, like, well, that's leaving out segments of the population. There's no reason to just prioritize sound when you're working with something that can't be naturally seen, regardless. We have a scientific story that's being, you know, expressed through this data, through this captured light, through a number of different telescopes, and we have to translate that into something we can either see or something we can hear.