​The sound of space discovery

GÉANT transforms 36 years of spacecraft data into
a musical duet

Cambridge, UK | 22 January 2014

Demonstrating the power of high-speed networks for
research and education

GÉANT, the pan-European data network serving 50 million research and education users at speeds of up to 500Gbps, recently demonstrated its power by sonifying 36 years’ worth of NASA Voyager spacecraft data and converting it into a musical duet.

Launched in 1977, both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are now decommissioned but still recording and sending live data to Earth. They continue to traverse different parts of the universe, billions of kilometres apart. Voyager 1 left our solar system last year.

Spacecraft duet

The project is the work of Domenico Vicinanza, Network Services Product Manager at GÉANT. As a trained musician with a PhD in Physics, he also takes the role of Arts and Humanities Manager, exploring new ways for representing data and discovery through the use of high-speed networks.

The result is an up-tempo string and piano orchestral piece. You can listen for yourself here: 

From space data to beautiful music

To compose the spacecraft duet, 320,000 measurements were first selected from each spacecraft, at one hour intervals. Then that data was converted into two very long melodies, each comprising 320,000 notes using different sampling frequencies, from a few KHz to 44.1 kHz.  

The result of the conversion into waveform, using such a big dataset, created a wide collection of audible sounds, lasting just a few seconds (slightly more than 7 seconds at 44.1kHz) to a few hours (more than 5hours using 1024Hz as a sampling frequency).   A certain number of data points, from a few thousand to 44,100 were each “converted” into 1 second of sound.

Using the grid computing facilities at EGI, GÉANT was able to create the duet live at the NASA booth at Super Computing 2013 using its superfast network to transfer data to/from NASA.

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​Domenico Vicinanza presenting at Super Computing 2013

Why this project?

While this project was created as a fun, accessible way to demonstrate the benefit of research and education networks to society, data sonification - representing data by means of sound signals – is increasingly used to accelerate scientific discovery; from epilepsy research to deep space discovery.

Why is GÉANT so important to scientific discovery?

European scientists are generating an ever-increasing amount of data, for instance at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, and in all data-driven scientific disciplines such as health and medicine, climate change, energy and food security. Thanks to GÉANT, researchers across Europe now benefit from a network with a backbone capacity of 100Gbps. When the terabit era arrives, the network can support up to 2Tbps.
GÉANT is the infrastructure part funded by the European Commission to support many of Europe’s biggest science projects. Have a look at some of the many people benefitting from GÉANT.   

Note to editors:
Download the full presentation on the GÉANT NASA Voyager sonification and pictures here: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B_U8Pnle4lbGY0I3VFd1YlRWMnc&usp=sharing

Further press information:
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paul.maurice@dante.net
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Acknowledgements
NASA National Space Science Data Center and the John Hopkins University Voyager LEPC experiment.
Sonification credits
Mariapaola Sorrentino and Giuseppe La Rocca.