By: Kathlynn Simotas 12/11/19
“the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us.”
-Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of music division at Boston Conservatory
Welcome to "No Sound In Space", a proof of concept for a larger project of sonifying astrophysical data with computer music techniques. This project is about orbits, specifically how the planets of our solar system orbit the sun, creating a modicum of harmony or "dance" amid the vastness of our galaxy and the universe.
This project entailed 3 primary tasks: modeling the orbits of the planets mathematically and translating that into javascript code, using spacialization techniques from Music 220A to actual create the orbits in binuaral "space", and composing melodies associated with each orbit and importing them into my code.
For the first task, an image does better than words:
For the second task, I used PannerNode, RequestAnimationFrame, and used the technqiues for handling and importing buffers to connect my melodies with the parameterization of the orbits. I also wrote code to calculate trajectories based on time into the code. All of this can be found in my test and orbiter classes. I ran into several bugs during my coding process the main ones being deciding to scale back from ambisonics to binaural, getting PannerNode to work with my trajectories, and preventing requestAnimationFrame from being called too many times, which leads to a drop in performance that introduces fuzz and glitches into the music. Additionally, I wrote a module to add reverberation using convolution to the buffersources based on distances, but when I listened to it, it muddied the movement of the sound so much, it would've defeated the purpose of the project. Thus, I opted to add a small amount of reverb to my samples using Garageband.
For the actual composition, I wrote a ~20 second melody for each planet and then recorded them on Garageband and uploaded them to my project. All of the melodies are based in F major to create a sense of harmony among the chaos of so many layers and so much motion. I also tried to stick with mostly simple, repetitive melodic phrases. I also tried to vary the frequency band on each melody so that they would be distinguishable from each other in larger groups.
For reference, courtesy of National Geographic:
TO LISTEN: You are the sun and get to decide how you would like to hear the orbits going on around you! WEAR HEADPHONES!! To hear an indiviudal orbit, click its name! To hear pairs, click one name and then the other (note: this works best with more similar trajectories, for instance within inner planets or outer planets). To hear small groups, click "Inner Planets" or "Outer Planets". Finally, to hear our solar system click "All". Refresh the page to reset the orbits when you click a different button.