Audible X-Rays

Star songs: from X-rays to music

How cosmic X-rays became music: project "X-Ray Hydra"

A binary star system in the constellation of Hydra emitted powerful X-rays. After travelling for 200 years, these X-rays were recorded by the NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory. Wanda Diaz Merced, a blind scientist doing research at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, used a computer program, 'xSonify', to convert these X-rays into a sequence of tones. Gerhard Sonnert, of the same institute, had the idea to turn these audible X-rays into music and offered it to Volkmar Studtrucker, a musician and composer, to write songs from the Hydra material.

Volkmar Studtrucker, a friend of mine from Niederndorf, created nine musical pieces from this sonified X-ray data, in a variety of musical styles.

These compositions were played and recorded  in a trio with himself (piano), Gerhard Sonnert of the Harvard-Smithsonian-Center for Astrophysic (bass), and Hans Peter Albrecht, a dermatologist (drums).

Please click on the link and listen how original X-rays sound and afterwords listen to the compositions from this data.

For further information on this project you can visit Mr Studtrucker's website

www.volkmar-studtrucker.de/werke/projekt-x-ray-hydra.html

or the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

www.cfa.harvard.edu/sed/projects/star_songs/index.html