W. Walker Smith and Alan Barker
We are all familiar with the elements of the periodic table, but have you ever wondered what hydrogen or zinc, for example, would look like? sound like? His W. Walker-Smith, now a graduate student at Indiana University, has combined his two passions for chemistry and music to create what he calls a new audiovisual instrument for communicating the concepts of chemical spectroscopy. .
At the American Chemical Society meeting in Indianapolis, Indiana this week, Smith announced a data sonification project that essentially converts the visible spectrum of the elements of the periodic table into sound. Smith even featured audio his clips of some of the elements, along with “compositions” featuring larger molecules, during his “The Sound of Molecules” show performance.
When I was a university student, “I [earned] With a dual degree in composition and chemistry, I was always looking for ways to translate my chemistry studies into music,” Smith said in a media briefing. How beautiful and different they look. I thought it would be really cool if we could turn a visible spectrum, a beautiful image into sound. ”
what does the element sound like?
Data sonification is not a new concept. For example, in 2018, scientists changed his image of NASA’s Mars rover Opportunity to his 5,000.th Martian sunrise to music. The particle physics data used to discover the Higgs boson, the echoes of star-devouring black holes, and the magnetometer readings of the Voyager missions have also been transformed into music. And a few years ago, a project called LHCSound built a library of “sounds” such as the top quark jet and the Higgs boson. The project hoped to develop sonification as a technique for analyzing data from particle collisions so that physicists can “detect” subatomic particles by ear.
Markus Buehler’s MIT lab maps the molecular structure of spider silk proteins to music theory to produce silk ‘sounds’ in hopes of establishing a radically new way to create designer proteins. famous for doing The hierarchical elements of musical composition (pitch, range, dynamics, tempo) are analogous to those of protein structure. Labs has devised a way for a human to “enter” his 3D spider web and explore its structure visually and aurally via his virtual reality setup. The ultimate goal is to learn to create similar synthetic spider webs and other structures that mimic spider processes.
A few years later, Buehler’s lab calculated the unique fingerprints of all the different secondary structures of proteins, sonicated them by transposition, and transformed them into music by transforming them to create new ones. devised an even more sophisticated system to create A protein not found in nature. The team also developed his free Android app called Amino Acid Synthesizer to allow users to create their own protein “compositions” from the sounds of amino acids.
As such, Smith is familiar with interactive periodic table projects. All elements emit different wavelengths of light when stimulated by electricity or heat, depending on their electronic energy levels. These chemical “fingerprints” make up the visible spectrum at the heart of chemical spectroscopy. Using an instrument called the Light Soundinator 3000, Smith converted these different frequencies of light into different pitches or musical notes, reducing those frequencies to within the human audible range. He professed to be amazed at the diversity of sounds.
“Red light has the lowest frequency in the visible range, so it sounds like a lower musical pitch than purple,” Smith said, demonstrating on a toy color-coded xylophone. As we move to , the frequency of light continues to rise, and so does the frequency of sound.Since violet is almost twice as high as the frequency of red light, it actually sounds like a musical octave.”Hydrogen Simple spectra with only a few lines in the spectrum, such as and helium, sound like “vaguely musical” chords, while elements with more complex spectra consisting of thousands of lines are It’s dense and noisy, and often sounds like a “cheesy horror movie.” effect,” said Smith.
His favorites: helium and zinc. “When I hear the frequency [of helium] One by one, not all at once, we got an interesting scale pattern and used it to make several songs, including ‘Helium Dance Party,'” Smith said. A very complex and dense grating sound. But Zink, for some reason, sounds like an angelic vocalist singing with vibrato despite having a multitude of frequencies. ”
Smith is currently working with the Wonder Lab Museum in Bloomington, Indiana to develop museum exhibits that allow visitors to interact with the periodic table, listen to laments, and create their own musical compositions from different sounds. doing. “What I want to do most is [convey] Ultimately, science and art are not that different,” he said.
