Making music with the Higgs boson
A team of researchers from across Europe have used the grid and the high-speed research network to create sweet music from the possible discovery of the Higgs boson last week.
Using the data presented last week at CERN, Domenico Vincinanza (from DANTE), Mariapaola Sorrentino (from the ASTRA project and LHCOpenSymphony) and Giuseppe La Rocca created two musical pieces with the sound of the Higgs boson.
“Being a scientist and a musician I love being able to combine the two,” says Domenico, who coordinated the work. “The technique we used is actually a valuable tool in many areas and this is not the first time we have used data to create music. But it is the first time we have used data from something as ground breaking as this.”
The team took the graphs presented by the ATLAS project last Wednesday and created a musical score from them using a technique called data sonification. In the end they created two pieces, one of piano on its own (Link to MP3), and the second with added bass, percussion, marimba and xylophone (Link to MP3). The peak indicating the newly discovered particle can be heard at 3.5 seconds of the piano tune.
Mass distribution for the two-photon channels. The strongest evidence for this new particle comes from analysis of events containing two photons. [enlarge]
The team at LHCOpenSymphony and ASTRA have used the technique previously to investigate volcanoes and even converted tweets into song. They are also involved in the Lost Sounds Orchestra recreating the sounds of ancient instruments for use by the archaeological community. All of this work requires enormous processing power and reliable high-speed networking to produce results so used both the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) and the the pan-European GÉANT. This mirrored the work done by the researchers at CERN, their results would have been impossible without EGI and GÉANT providing the computing power and networking necessary to make one of the biggest breakthroughs in modern physics.
Domenico’s work on recreating the ancient epigonion is one of EGI’s ‘Stories from the grid’, a web series of videos highlighting work done using the EGI infrastructure. You can see the video here http://go.egi.eu/epigonion
11 July 2012
Sara Coelho