Elemental Music: Interactive Periodic Table Turns He, Fe, Ca Into Do, Re, Mi
Freeman writes:
We're all familiar with the elements of the periodic table, but have you ever wondered what hydrogen or zinc, for example, might sound like? W. Walker Smith, now a graduate student at Indiana University, combined his twin passions of chemistry and music to create what he calls a new audio-visual instrument to communicate the concepts of chemical spectroscopy.
Smith presented his data sonification project-which essentially transforms the visible spectra of the elements of the periodic table into sound-at a meeting of the American Chemical Society being held this week in Indianapolis, Indiana. Smith even featured audio clips of some of the elements, along with "compositions" featuring larger molecules, during a performance of his "The Sound of Molecules" show.
As an undergraduate, "I [earned] a dual degree in music composition and chemistry, so I was always looking for a way to turn my chemistry research into music," Smith said during a media briefing.
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Data sonification is not a new concept. For instance, in 2018, scientists transformed NASA's image of Mars rover Opportunity on its 5,000th sunrise on Mars into music. The particle physics data used to discover the Higgs boson, the echoes of a black hole as it devoured a star, and magnetometer readings from the Voyager mission have also been transposed into music. And several years ago, a project called LHCSound built a library of the "sounds" of a top quark jet and the Higgs boson, among others. The project hoped to develop sonification as a technique for analyzing the data from particle collisions so that physicists could "detect" subatomic particles by ear.
Related:
Scientists Are Turning Data Into Sound to Listen to the Whispers of the Universe (and More) (Aug. 2022)
How one Astronomer Hears the Universe (Jan. 2020)
The Bird's Ear View of Space Physics: NASA Scientists Listen to Data (Sept. 2014)
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