Making Music from Scientific Data

  Glenn McClure will be composing music based on scientific data taken in Antarctica.  How can one transform scientific data into sounds or music?  In this tutorial, we will explore some ways in which this could be done.  The techniques that Professor McClure employs to produce his work might be different from the methods described below, but these examples show one way in which measurements could be transformed into sounds.

   Methods like these are applied in scientific research.  The discovery of gravitational waves was presented with audio to show what the gravitational waves - which are not sound waves - "sound like".

  Activity 1

  Take a look at the video below, which shows a cart on an inclined ramp.  The ramp is nearly frictionless.  When the cart is released, it accelerates down the ramp and bounces off the end.

  We measured the position of the cart at different times and produced a graph of the position vs. time.  Here x = 0 corresponds to the left-hand end of the ramp.

Suppose you relate the position of the cart with a frequency of sound.  Then when the cart is near x = 0, the sound frequency is low and when x is far from the starting point, the sound frequency is high.  Replay the video above and try to hum what this would sound like.

We wrote an equation to connect the position of the cart to the frequency of sound.  Click on the video below to hear the resulting audio play along with the video.

Activity 2

Below is a video of a mass oscillating on a spring.  Watch the video and try to imagine how you would produce a sound with the frequency proportional to the position of the mass.

Here is a graph of the position of the mass as a function of time:

Here's the same video with audio produced by one possible way of relating sound frequency to the position of the mass.