Via reddit (if youre a redditor, go there and upboat!) I found a very interesting use of astronomical data in music. The composer took the orbital information from the six-planet system called Kepler 11 and codified it into musical notes! From the YouTube notes:

Here, Ive taken each transit seen by the observatory and assigned a pitch and volume to it. The pitch (note) is determined by the planets distance from its star (closer=higher), and they are drawn from a minor 11 chord. The volume is determined by the size of the planet (larger=louder).

The result is actually quite listenable!

Thats lovely, and oddly compelling. Its like the notes are trying to reach some sort of coherence, straining to achieve a melody, but dont quite make it. I find this interesting: after listening, and without having to check, I knew the planets werent in orbital resonance.

A resonance is when one planets orbit is a simple fraction of anothers; for example, one planet might circle the star every 2 days, and the next one out in 4 days. Resonances take many ratios, like 3:2, or 5:3. The planets in Kepler-11 dont do this (though two of them are near a 5:4 resonance). If they did, then eventually the sonatas melody, such as it is, would repeat. But I didnt get a sense of that listening to it.

Isnt that amazing? You can take data using light, convert it to sound, and actually be able to get insight into it. In this case, of course, you could just make a spreadsheet with the planetary periods in it and start dividing away, but thats no fun!

Perhaps this is just an oddity with no real impact. But I wonder. We convert data into charts and graphs so that we can look for trends, correlations, compare one datum to another visually. In a sense haha, "sense"! this is just another case of that, appealing to hearing instead of sight. Im not a musician per se* so I dont know if this method has real use or not.

But its still cool. And rather pleasant, dont you think?

* 20+ years of playing bass trombone may be used to argue my musicianship either way, I suspect.

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Excerpt from:

Piano sonata in the key of Kepler-11 | Bad Astronomy