Sounding the Universe

Electronic Music and Scientific Data in Public Engagement

UHasselt collaborated with ten students of electronic music at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama (London, UK). For this project, we asked students to transform scientific data related to sonification of black holes into an affective sound-based artwork that makes the Einstein Telescope project tangible, approachable, and discussable for a broad public audience. The students received a data set of cosmic events (black holes colliding, neutrino stars exploding, gravitational waves) captured by KU Leuven Gravity Institute that could be used to “sonify” these events.  Five of these students worked and produced a twenty-minute ambient audio piece, and the other five students produced individual art pieces.