Celebrating CERN with the sounds of science

Domenico Vicinanza has already used data sonification to create several innovative musical compositions, including using data from NASA's Voyager probes, brain scans, and volcanoes. Now, he's sonified data from the ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, and LHCb experimets on CERN's Large Hadron Collider. The piece was commissioned as part of the celebrations for the 60th anniversary of CERN.

"The sonification method used to create this piece works by associating a musical note to each measurement coming from the experiments," says Vicinanza, who is network services product manager at the pan-European research and education network GÉANT, where he also has the role of arts and humanities manager. "The resulting melody is then an actual presentation of the scientific data, just using sounds instead of coloured dots."

Concert given by the European Union Youth Orchestra, directed by Maestro Vladimir Ashkenazy. Image courtesy CERN.

Vicinanza also sonified the text of the CERN Convention, which was signed back in 1953 and led to the establishment of the organization a year later. He translated this text into a long melody by mapping each character of the text to a musical note, according to its position within the English alphabet. "Data sonification can be a quite intensive process and creating the melody from the text of the CERN Convention relied on the pan-European GÉANT network, which operates at speeds of up to 100 gigabits per second, and the EGI grid computing infrastructure," explains Vicinanza. "Grid computing is one of the 'power tools' behind the discovery of the Higgs boson. It is also a precious tool for data sonification since it enables several mappings to be explored at the same time."

– Andrew Purcell