Sounds of the Universe: Making Music From the Supernova Cassiopeia A

While we know what it looks like when a star explodes into a luminous supernova, here's a chance to discover what one sounds like--sorta. Scientists have translates a supernova's electromagnetic waves into waves of sound; and when there is sound, there is music. Enter the Grateful Dead. The band's famed percussionist Mickey Hart is working on a musical project to "sonify" the universe--taking sounds collected by scientists from supernovae and other astronomical phenomena and using them in his new album "Rhythms of the Universe." To anyone who has ever heard one of the Grateful Dead's extended "drums and space" jams, this shouldn't come as much of a surprise. Keith Jackson, a computer scientist and musician who works at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, collaborated with Hart on this project, collecting data from the supernova Cassiopeia A. He converted this high-frequency electromagnetic wave data into lower-frequency sound waves that are within the ...