Space scientists find that solar wind becomes music in the right hands
By Robert Sanders, Media Relations | 20 April 2006
BERKELEY – The music of composer and musician Roberto Morales-Manzanares has been inspired by the sea, by wind and wave, by mathematical equations, and now – thanks to his collaboration with space scientists at the University of California, Berkeley – the breeze of electrons from the sun.
Morales, a doctoral student at UC Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT), has made a name for himself in the computer music field, generating music using rules or algorithms seldom associated with music.
“We are surrounded by computers and technology, we’re being hit by media all the time, so you have to use it to create art,” he said. “I see technology as a traditional tool for composition like Bach used the pipe organ in his time.”
He was an obvious choice to work with physicists at UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory on a piece of software to convert data from a pair of NASA satellites comprising the Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory, or STEREO, into sound, a concept that has acquired the name “sonification.”
STEREO, scheduled for launch later this year, will provide a stereoscopic view of the sun and solar explosions called coronal mass ejections, which generate space storms that affect Earth. The IMPACT (In-situ Measurements of Particles and CME Transients) suite of instruments aboard STEREO, however, focuses, not on pretty pictures, but on the wind of electrons and ions from the sun, and the magnetic field of the sun.
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