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The Sound Gardens of
The Universe
Floral arrangements made with the spectrograms of radio emissions from different sources in the Universe.
by
UNPLUCKED &
Pablo A. Padilla Jargstorf
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The Sound Gardens of The Universe
You may be familiar with that famous line ‘ there is no point in screaming in space, nobody can hear you’. Although slightly dark, there is a point to this statement. Indeed, sound doesn't travel through space. For that to happen, space would have to be filled with air and not be an almost perfect vacuum.
But space is everything but silent, and it certainly isn’t empty. Not just the multitude of stellar objects, with their solid, liquid and gas components, but also plasma. Plasma is the word given to the fourth state of matter, a gas that is so hot that some or all its constituent atoms are split up into electrons and ions, which can move independently of each other. The nature of these electrically charged particles makes them subject to differing magnetic forces in space, generating electromagnetic vibrations which can be detected and recorded.
An example of this would be the interactions between charged electromagnetic particles generated by solar winds, called the ionosphere, and the magnetosphere surrounding astronomical bodies such as stars and planets which have internal dynamos (**) capable of generating magnetic fields. In the case of our own planet Earth, this branch of scientific research studying what is commonly known as Space Weather can help us explain how we are protected from solar winds, how the beautiful auroras are formed, and to understand these events can have on technological infrastructures we are increasingly reliant on, such as satellites, telecommunications networks, and power grids.
Mankind is now able to ‘listen’ to these amazing ‘sounds’ through specially designed instruments carried on some of our space probes, capable of recording electromagnetic vibrations within the range of human hearing (200-20,00 Hz).
From spectrograms to flower arrangements
Step 1 - Sound Visualisation - How it works
Spectrograms are used to visualize sounds. A spectrogram is a 2d or 3d visual representation of the frequencies of sound as they vary with time. There are many types of spectrograms, but they normally look like this:
In a spectrogram one axis represents time while the other one shows the frequencies. The third parameter in a spectrogram is the amplitude of a specific frequency at a particular time. Amplitude is measured with a colour scale and also with height in a 3d visualization.
From spectrograms to flower arrangements
Step 2 - The blooming transformation of a spectrogram
A. From 2D to 3D
B. Spherification
C. Twist
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