This Astronomer Turned A Star’s Vibrations into a Song

It's not the first time space objects have made music. In 2014, it was revealed that the Rosetta comet was "singing a song" in the form of oscillations in its magnetic field. Burak Ulaş, a Turkish astronomer from Izmir Turk College Planetarium in Turkey, has now developed a duet between a piano player and a star.

In an Arxiv paper highlighted in the MIT Technology Review, Ulas describes generating musical chords from the oscillation frequencies of a faraway star in our galaxy dubbed Y Cam A.

To make his starry music, Ulaş describes defining "three dimensionless transformation parameters (relative frequency, loudness, and starting time values) in order to generate a musical chord from the stellar oscillations." He used audio software Audacity to transform Y Cam A's vibrations (which were like a wave made up of four sine-lie frequencies) into audible, albeit otherworldly sounding tones. He combined these vibrations with some piano music—which he recorded separately—using a digital audio editor called GoldWave.

In the image up top, the two upper bars show the piano player's part while the lower bar displays the bizarre notation showing the star's sections in the music. Ulaş writes that this type of notation was chosen "because of the impossibility of displaying the second, third and fourth frequencies of the generated chords by using any musical notation on staff with the G clef."

A star's vibrations are caused by "starquakes"—seismic waves that ripple through the star causing it to emit light. Astronomers use astroseismology to study these vibrations so they can better understand the structure and behaviour of stars. While he was at it, Ulaş also found parallels between a star's seismic waves and the way that chords are generated in musical instruments.

"A chord is a group of sound waves having my frequencies emerged simultaneously from a musical instrument," he writes. Similarly, Ulaş states that by analyzing the light that emerges from a star, you can determine "a wave containing many sine like variations with certain frequencies and amplitudes."

Insights into these parallels inspired Ulaş' first attempts at a piano-star remix. In the future, he writes that he hopes to use a variety of musical instruments and vibrating stars to create a richer, orchestral soundscape for an audience.