NASA turned space photos into music

NASA has another project that transforms space photographs into sounds. Utilizing sonification, pictures got from telescopes are transformed into “music” that seems like what you’d hear when your operating system boots up.

The inventive project is being done by researchers at NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.

“Telescopes give us a chance to see what the Galactic Center looks like in different types of light,” NASA composes. “By translating the inherently digital data (in the form of ones and zeroes) captured by telescopes in space into images, astronomers create visual representations that would otherwise be invisible to us.

“But what about experiencing these data with other senses like hearing?”

Sonification is the way toward making an interpretation of information into sound. Beginning the left half of pictures and advancing toward the right, NASA’s sonification framework peruses in the vertical columns of pixels and makes sounds that speak to the position and brightness of things seen.

“The light of objects located towards the top of the image are heard as higher pitches while the intensity of the light controls the volume,” NASA says with respect to the Milky Way photograph and music in the 1-minute video above. “Stars and compact sources are converted to individual notes while extended clouds of gas and dust produce an evolving drone.

“The crescendo happens when we reach the bright region to the lower right of the image. This is where the 4-million-solar-mass supermassive black hole at the center of the Galaxy, known as Sagittarius A* (A-star), resides, and where the clouds of gas and dust are the brightest.”