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Quantum Whistles

Jordi Montaner | 31 may 2010

Website: www.lhcsound.com

Lily Asquith, a researcher from the department of physics and astronomy at the University of London, has spent the last two years in France following the trail of the Higgs boson with the ATLAS detector. Seated at the “God machine,” a gigantic, 27-kilometers-long particle accelerator installed at CERN where one hundred physicists from around the world seek to explain the origin of matter, Asquith focused her attention on a particular boson with both quark and anti-quark properties called tth(H-> bb), also known as SUSY (an abbreviation for supersymmetric particle).

She was able to do this with the help of the ATLAS detector, which maps the parameters of energy, mass or velocity by identifying a sound for each of them and analyzing their variations according to the modulations of the sounds. The process is known as sonification, and it has been used from NASA in space exploration to medical bioengineering to allow color blind people to interpret what colors they can not discern from color-coded sounds.

The young physicists ended up falling in love with the natural sound emitted by the ATLAS detector in search of SUSY and shared her infatuation with a bunch of musician friends in Brixton, U.K. The percussionist of the group was immediately hooked as well and got together with other musicians and sound engineers to create the LHCSound Project, whose website offers MP3 sound clips extracted from the CERN Hadron Collider.


Lily Asquith
The results are both funny and shocking. Some clips remind you of the start of some  King Crimson songs with mysterious chants that gave depth to the dark symphonic rock of Robert Fripp and company. An Irish proverb states that “the stars do not make noise,” but the wise Pythagoras followed his intuition and dubbed this celestial noise the “music of the spheres,” a beautiful concept which Mike Oldfield pays tribute to with the title of his most recent album.

Asquith, however, is not so concerned about the metaphysics of this finding (some people talk of the music of the God particle, referring to the origin of the universe), but rather in its pure physics. Through the LHCSound Project, she seeks to classify the data processed by the ATLAS and add them to an algorithm that prints columns of numbers, in turn, representing properties of energy, spatial position and time, which are then interpreted by Csound composition software that assigns a distinctive ring for each type of particle. Another possibility would be the assignment of colors. “I always thought that the electrons are blue," she said.

From just particular notes or short acoustic sequences, the LHCSound Project hopes to move on to composing more sophisticated pieces like sound of the hadron shower reproduced in the collider.

The downloadable MP3 clip is called HiggsJetSimple. It is supposed to represent the properties of a jet of energy deposits associated with an angular distance.

Through sonification, our ears determine an inclination of three degrees from a frequency change of 0.3% of the auditory threshold. It all began in 1997 when two American physicists sought to measure quantum oscillations with an oscilloscope whose audible signal was a whistle. They found that the “quantum whistle” varied depending on the quantum oscillation and thus laid the foundations for this new musical experiment and beautiful rapprochement between science and art.

Sound engineers Archer Endrich, Richard Dobson and Ed Chocolate worked with Asquith on the LHCSound Project. Through a giant particle accelerator, not only are we able to reproduce the origin of the universe, but we can now listen to its soundtrack as well. Although a physiologist would surely mention that since the Big Bang was a silent holocaust, there is no sound for our ears to discern. In other words, before life there was only silence and opacity of colors, a domain of a God who was perhaps deaf, dumb and achromatic (which is yet another possibility).

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