When NASA and other space agencies release sounds from space, what are we actually hearing? The answer: data sonifications. Scientists take data from telescopes, often across multiple wavelengths of light, and translate them into audible soundscapes. Host Dean Regas talks with Mara Helmuth, a composer and professor of music at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, about how researchers turn cosmic data into music.
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Also mentioned in this episode:
- Mara Helmuth's data sonification composition, "From Orion to Cassiopeia"
- The final scene from the 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi
- Centaur Rocket Explosion, 1962
Episode Transcript: Looking Up is transcribed using a combination of AI speech recognition and human editors. It may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.
Dean Regas: Outer space is traditionally noiseless. I mean, it's mostly empty after all. But what if you're on or around a planet? A star or a galaxy? Do they make sounds? If there's an atmosphere. What if we add some music?
[will.i.am Debuts New Song on Mars via Curiosity Rover]: Breaking news in space. William's new song, "Reach for the Stars," is premiering today on the surface of Mars.
Dean Regas: In 2012, the musician will. I am tried just that. Broadcasting a song from Mars.
[NASA: "Reach for the Stars" with will.i.am]: Roll the song. Here we go.
Dean Regas: It was definitely a unique way to debut a song. They say the sky is the limit. When I see the footprints on the moon, my question is this: Did the rover come with external speakers? And what did the Martians think of it?
From the studios of Cincinnati Public Radio, I'm your host, Dean Regas, and this is "Looking Up," the show that takes you deep into the cosmos, or just to the telescope in your backyard, to learn more about what makes this amazing universe of ours so great. My guest today is Mara Helmuth, a composer and professor of music at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.
The big problem with sounds or music in space is that you need a medium to hear them. On Earth, it's air or water, I guess, if you're undersea. So when NASA and other space agencies release sounds from space, well, how do they do that? Answer: data sonifications. Scientists take data from telescopes, sometimes in many different wavelengths of light, and translate them into audible sounds. So they don't really sound like that, but it reflects more about the energy that's observed on or around it.
For example, here's a clip from the Cassini spacecraft around the rings of Saturn. And here are the sounds, I'm air quoting here, of the Cassini spacecraft as it made its fateful plunge into Saturn's atmosphere at the end of its mission.
What if we go by Jupiter? Here is the Juno spacecraft as it passes by the large planet. And it recorded this info, then translated into sounds. Turning pictures into sounds. It's pretty cool, but even better, the Mars rovers can record actual sounds. Mars has 1% of the atmosphere Earth does, so sounds are really quiet. Like, here is the wind on Mars. And this is what it sounds like as the Perseverance rover fired digging lasers at Mars rocks before sampling their insides. And these are the sounds of the Perseverance rover rolling across the Martian terrain.
Images and data from space inspire music in many genres. So let's explore one that may be totally out of this world.
Mara Helmuth: Hello, my name is Mara Helmuth, and I'm a composer. And I work with computers a lot. It seems like the computer makes its way into most of my music because I love the possibilities that I can change sounds and alter ultrasounds.
Dean Regas: Well, Mara, thanks so much for joining me today.
Mara Helmuth: You're welcome. Thank you for having me.
Dean Regas: Well, so you're a composer of a very unique form of music. Tell us all about it.
Mara Helmuth: Yes. I've also been involved with acoustic music and played the piano and all that, but somehow I got interested in electronic music in college, and I took a class at the University of Illinois and got totally hooked on that. And then I moved on to the computer after a few years of working with analog stuff. So that was actually why I became a composer, because I was so excited about the sounds I was making and the possibilities of doing anything with the electronic music tools that I had.
Dean Regas: Well, and where do you find your inspiration? Does, does some of it come from outer space?
Mara Helmuth: Yes. Actually, I get all sorts of inspirations from the world that we live in, and even outer space. I've always actually had a long-term interest in astronomy. My dad was a scientist, and I always had this double interest in science and music. So anyway, at some point I realized I really need to do some music with astronomy. And this technique called sonification is a big thing now, that people are taking scientific data and mapping it into sound. And so I thought, well, I bet I could do that with some astronomical thing. And I was thinking, well, black holes are really cool, so I was going to do that. But I researched it, and I thought, well, you know, pulsars are actually much more exciting because they have a rhythm and a timbre. So it seemed more logical to actually go with the pulsars and see what I could do with that.
Dean Regas: Well, I'll be honest, I'm always slightly perplexed about it when NASA posts sounds in space, like when they play back what Jupiter sounds like, or a star. And I thought you needed air, a medium for sound to exist.
Mara Helmuth: Sometimes they have to translate those signals into something that we can actually hear. With the pulsar, there is actually a rhythm, and it's electromagnetic radiation that's coming at us in these pulsars, because they're spinning around really fast, or sometimes not so fast, depending on it. But there are ways to make the data audible if it isn't already.
Dean Regas: So, so now you're getting me thinking that pulsars have a beat, huh?
Mara Helmuth: Yeah, they do. It's catchy.
Dean Regas: Well, so how did your work "From Orion to Cassiopeia" come about?
Mara Helmuth: Okay, so I got this idea. I really have to do something with astronomy. And so I started looking around on the NASA website and other websites, and I found that ISO. And then I started finding data, and there was a wonderful mapping of pulsars into a visual display that somebody had done, and he had, I believe, used the ATNF database, which is the Australia Telescope National Facility data for pulsars. And I went and looked at the website and thought, wow, this data I could use, because I could dump this all into text files and somehow tried to map it into my granular synthesis techniques. So I decided to go with that. And it was very difficult, because the data of astronomical things is so extreme. You have very tiny numbers or very huge numbers, so it required a lot of scaling and things like that.
Dean Regas: Well, and then for, for people wanting to add a little visual element to accompany your music, you also have a video that goes with it, and we have a link to it on our website so people can watch and listen. How did you wed the sounds to the images shown?
Mara Helmuth: Right. Actually, it's a little bit abstract, because the sonification of the data is very precise, like sweeping across the Milky Way. However, Bill Gwynn's photos are not really like that. They're beautiful, stunning pictures from one specific area of space. And so he wanted to try to preserve the sweep across the Milky Way, but also put the star clusters and the things that are shown into sort of the right place. But he didn't get too picky about it.
Dean Regas: Well, I'm glad you mentioned Bill. Bill Gwynn was a longtime amateur astronomer here in Cincinnati, and I knew him way back when, in the '90s, before he moved. And I was so glad when I saw his name come up on the back of the video. I was like, yep, this is going to be good. So glad you guys have met and collaborated. And so, yeah, I wanted to play a little bit from "From Orion to Cassiopeia." We have a couple of sections here I wanted to play for you. Let's start off with number one. We're going to start off with the Crab Nebula. And then it'll go into the Horsehead Nebula next, coming up. And then I think we're going to end up in the Hercules star cluster. So, yeah, take us into each of those. And how did you line up the music with that?
Mara Helmuth: Right. These louder bursts of sound are from when you're crossing a spiral arm of the galaxy, because there are a lot more pulsars in those arms than there are between them. So what you're hearing is the clusters of pulsars that are at that exact point in space. And so the picture is from something in that area of the galaxy.
Dean Regas: Well, it's interesting to see, yeah, the different sounds of different volumes. We talked about pulsars a little bit, but for you, what are the loudest objects in space that we could really rock out to?
Mara Helmuth: Yeah. And I think the loudest parts, and I really had to scale these down because they're really loud, actually louder than you hear, are these big, dissonant, sometimes very high-pitched clusters of pulsars. These are millisecond pulsars, which are pulsars that are spinning so fast that you don't hear the rhythm, actually. And so when you get a whole lot of those, which you do in younger star areas, you get a very dense, dissonant sound. Now, the opposite of that is the slow, low-pitched ones, which are the old, dying pulsars. They're kind of spinning down and slowing down, and you only hear pulses maybe every second or so.
Dean Regas: Oh. So if you get the fast-spinning ones, you could make a really quick song. You could say, hey, everybody, slow this down real slow, and it'll last an hour.
Mara Helmuth: But it really is only one second of material. I did make one version of the piece. I could do any version with my sonification, and one of them was like three hours long.
Dean Regas: Well, and so what do you hope that listeners get out of your music when they find you there?
Mara Helmuth: A lot of different things. Probably people take different things away, but maybe just some of the excitement of the things that we can't really see that are out there, and learning a little bit more. I mean, for me, it was just so exciting to think, wow, this is actually representing a physical fact of what's out there in space. And it's enormously complex and varied, and really different from everything we hear on Earth. So I hope they get some of that excitement from it.
Dean Regas: Well, Mara, thanks so much for joining me today. This is a lot of fun.
Mara Helmuth: Thank you. Thank you.
Dean Regas: When I think of music from space movies, my default setting takes me, of course, to "2001: A Space Odyssey," the old movie from 1968, directed by Stanley Kubrick, featuring the memorable. And of course, for flying through space, it's tough to beat "The Blue Danube Waltz." But one of my favorites, and one that you might not have heard of, is an atmospheric piece by Philip Glass that accompanies a rocket launch. The movie was "Koyaanisqatsi." You've probably seen clips of it. This is people rushing around in super-fast motion, cars, planes, crowds, all moving at a hectic pace. It has no words but shows life out of balance on Earth. The final scene shows a rocket launch with some stirring music at liftoff. The music turns more ominous as the rocket soars higher, spewing jets of flames as it heads toward space. Something's going to go wrong. You know it. The rocket suddenly explodes, and a ball of fire fills the entire screen. Bits of the shattered rocket emerge and cascade downward. The camera quickly finds one distinguishing piece of wreckage and somehow follows its tumbling, burning fragment of this once-grand rocket. The video and audio is tortuously slow here, following the doomed piece slowly, slowly falling for minutes and minutes. It's a haunting scene, made all the more so by Philip Glass's music.
I was so moved by this that I wanted to look up the story behind this exploded rocket. Like, when did it happen? Were there any people on board? It took some digging, but this rocket launch happened in 1962. It was an early NASA test of the Centaur rocket after nearly a year's delay posed by its liquid hydrogen fuel.
[Centaur Rocket Explosion. 1962]: The mighty Centaur is on its pad at Cape Canaveral for a maiden flight. It is to be boosted into space by an Atlas, or a 15-minute flight. A flight scheduled to study the performance of the temperamental hydrogen fuel.
Dean Regas: No one was on board, thankfully, but rocket explosions like this were more common than I knew. It's still so fascinating to me that photographers captured this moment with such great detail, even following the wreckage all the way to when it eventually splashed down into the ocean. We'll add links to both videos, and see what you think of the musical accompaniment in "Koyaanisqatsi," as well as the lyrical, well, maybe more newsy voice in the documentary footage.
[Centaur Rocket Explosion. 1962]: The Centaur is designed to put a payload of more than a ton on the moon, or 1,000 pounds in the vicinity of Mars or Venus.
Dean Regas: Looking up with Dean Regas is a production of Cincinnati Public Radio. Kevin Reynolds and I created the podcast in 2017. Ella Rowen and Carlos Lopez Cornu produce and edit our show and are starting a lunar grunge spoken-word band called the Looker Uppers, touring soon.
Jenell Walton is our Vice President of Content, and Ronny Salerno is our digital platforms manager. Our theme song is, “Possible Light” by Ziv Moran. Our social media coordinator is Hannah Pflum, and our cover art is by Nicole Tiffany. I'm Dean Regas, keep looking up!
