Sonification of the Higgs Boson – the Sound of Particle
FollowThe July 4 achievement and the discovery of Higgs Boson particle, created new possiblities for the researchers who have “sonified” the data from the Atlas experiment, by turning these scientific findings into music using data sonification. Working from results supplied by the Atlas experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), researchers have created melodies that make the results easier to understand.
Sonification requires enormous amounts of networking and processing power to produce results, as the pan-European GÉANT network reports, it is the project coordinated by Domenico Vicinanza of DANTE (the UK-based organisation that operates the GÉANT network on behalf of European national research and education networks (NRENs)), in collaboration with Mariapaola Sorrentino of ASTRA Project, Cambridge, who contributed to the sonification process and Giuseppe La Rocca from INFN Catania, responsible for the computing framework.
“In the music the peak of high notes in the second bar is the appearance of the Higgs-like particle (about 3.5 seconds into the recording). The researchers created two versions, one as a piano solo, and the second with added bass, percussion, marimba and xylophone.”
Take a listen on a SoundCloud:
“The discovery of the Higgs-like particle is a major step forward in our knowledge of the world around us,” said Domenico Vicinanza, DANTE. “By using sonification we are able to make this breakthrough easier to understand by the general public, highlighting the depth and breadth of the enormous research efforts by the thousands of scientists around the world involved with the Large Hadron Collider. Neither the discovery of the particle or this sonification process would have been possible without the high speed research networks that connect scientists across the world, enabling them to collaborate, analyse data and share their results.”
Resources to listen to the Higgs Boson-like particle:
Piano solo
Piano, bass, percussion, marimba and xylophone
The data on which the sonification is based (ATLAS collaboration – copyright CERN)
The score of the sonification (PDF)