LISTEN: Scientists Have Turned A Martian Sunrise Into A Song

What does a martian sunrise sound like? Now you can find out, as researchers have “sonified” (or turned into sound) an image of the Opportunity rover’s 5,000th sunrise on Mars. The data have been used to create a unique, two-minute piece of music, titled “Mars Soundscapes” — check it out below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loXhsglsG-w To turn the photo into sound, researchers scanned across the image from left to right. They combined brightness and color from each individual pixel with information about the terrain’s elevation, then assigned each value a pitch and melody. As the image grows from dark to light from the edge to the center, the pitch of the music rises to “show” the bright disk of the Sun rising in the sky. “Image sonification is a really flexible technique to explore science and it can be used in several domains, from studying certain characteristics of planet surfaces and atmospheres, to ...