Music is all around us, not just here on Earth but also out there in space. Even stars can make music, at least according to a new composition that takes the sound of a pulsating star and not only sets it to music but also gives it a piano as an accompaniment.
The resulting musical composition offers up something that feels quiet and understated, but also surreal.
For this piece, "Awkward Keystrokes of Y Cam," Burak Ulaş of the Izmir College Planetarium in Turkey chose a star over 1,000 light-years from Earth. This star, known as Y Cam A, is part of a binary system in the Camelopardalis constellation. After measuring the star's brightness, scientists found that it rings like a bell, vibrating at a total of four different frequencies.
Ulaş began the composition by recording the frequencies, loudness and rhythm of the star's vibrations. Then, he converted those measurements into musical notes.
"The music scores and the digital sound files are provided for both the generated chords and the musical composition," writes Ulaş in the resulting study. "Our study shows that the further orchestral compositions can be made from the frequency analysis results of several pulsating stars by using the procedure stated in present study."
You can listen to the composition below:
This isn't the first time that a celestial body has become music. An agency called Party took data about a red dwarf over 1,500 light-years away and converted that to a composition called "Melody of a Dying Star."
Also, former Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart collaborated with a physicist to come up with a composition based on the sounds of the Universe.
"The efforts on combining the celestial objects with music have been made for ages," writes Ulaş in the new study. "Pythagorians' philosophical concept, Musica Universalis, pointing a harmony in celestial movements and Kepler's works on relating the planetary motions to musical consonance can be given as examples."
