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Freeman [soylentnews.org] writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/03/elemental-music-interactive-periodic-table-turns-he-fe-ca-into-do-re-mi/ [arstechnica.com]

We're all familiar with the elements of the periodic table, but have you ever wondered what hydrogen or zinc, for example, might sound like? W. Walker Smith, now a graduate student at Indiana University, combined his twin passions of chemistry and music to create what he calls a new audio-visual instrument to communicate the concepts of chemical spectroscopy.

Smith presented his data sonification project [wikipedia.org]—which essentially transforms the visible spectra of the elements of the periodic table into sound—at a meeting of the American Chemical Society being held this week in Indianapolis, Indiana. Smith even featured audio clips of some of the elements, along with "compositions" featuring larger molecules, during a performance of his "The Sound of Molecules" show.

As an undergraduate, "I [earned] a dual degree in music composition and chemistry, so I was always looking for a way to turn my chemistry research into music," Smith said during a media briefing [youtube.com].
[...]
Data sonification is not a new concept. For instance, in 2018, scientists transformed [arstechnica.com] NASA's image of Mars rover Opportunity on its 5,000th sunrise on Mars into music. The particle physics data [gizmodo.com] used to discover the Higgs boson, the echoes of a black hole [arstechnica.com] as it devoured a star, and magnetometer readings from the Voyager mission have also been transposed into music. And several years ago, a project called LHCSound [theguardian.com] built a library of the “sounds” of a top quark jet and the Higgs boson, among others. The project hoped to develop sonification as a technique for analyzing the data from particle collisions so that physicists could “detect” subatomic particles by ear.

Related:
Scientists Are Turning Data Into Sound to Listen to the Whispers of the Universe (and More) [soylentnews.org] (Aug. 2022)
How one Astronomer Hears the Universe [soylentnews.org] (Jan. 2020)
The Bird's Ear View of Space Physics: NASA Scientists Listen to Data [soylentnews.org] (Sept. 2014)

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