How space sounds: Yandex. Music represents an audio journey through the universe

Yandex. Music presents playlist-audio travel "Music of the Stars". The journey begins from the Sun and ends at the supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy M87, 53.5 million light-years from Earth. On the way, you can hear how different celestial bodies “sound” - stars, pulsars and whole galaxies, learn more about them from scientists' comments and even imagine how they look: video shots were made for each track, small looped video. The peculiarity of the playlist is that the stars and galaxies themselves became co-authors of the music: each track is composed based on their unique parameters, which were converted into music using algorithms.

Andrey Gevak

Head of Yandex. Music.

Movies somehow taught us that the sounds of space are either heavy, disturbing music, or abstract ambient. But the thing is, nobody knows what space actually sounds like. More precisely, how it could sound if sound propagated there. The music we are used to is just someone's fantasy. We thought, why not fantasize too, but not just like that, but by combining creativity and technology. As a result, we got a new sound of space, which we want to introduce our users to.

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Turn data into Yandex. The music was helped by methods of sonification. From the brightness, motion and other characteristics of celestial bodies, they singled out frequency and amplitude - what can be used as parameters of sound. Each parameter is expressed numerically, and using the table, these numbers were compared with certain notes. Then they picked up harmonic movement, instruments and effects - and as a result, 10 completed works were obtained. The journey ends with a bonus episode in which musicians, programmers, astronomers and experts share how technology and creativity can be linked.

Each track reflects the unique characteristics of its celestial body. For example, the track "Sun" used data on the periodicity of solar flares over the past 60 years - from which a melody was obtained. The track "Eclipsing", dedicated to the double star system of Beta Lyra, is written in the size of a waltz: in the system the stars revolve around each other, and in the track one melody replaces another. In the track "Galaxy", the hero of which was the galaxy NGC 2442 in the constellation Flying Fish, the effect was used spectral synthesizer, which received a photograph of the galaxy at the input and generated sounds for compositions.

The Music of Stars playlist was created by the Yandex team. Music with the participation of astrophysicists. It used data from the Radioastron project of the FIAN Astrospace Center, the American Association Variable Star Observers (AAVSO), Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC), Roscosmos and NASA.

This is not the first time Yandex has experimented with parametric music. In 2019 Yandex. Music released the album "Inhuman Music", which includes works written by composers in collaboration with the Yandex neural network. In 2016, the album "Neural Defense" was released, inspired by the work of Yegor Letov. All the texts for him were written by a neural network.

The Music of the Stars playlist can be streamed at Yandex. Music and in Yandex search.

Material provided by the press service of Yandex. Music. Lifehacker's editors are not responsible for the publication.