Hydrogen has a scale pattern; zinc "sounds like an angelic vocalist singing with vibrato."
JENNIFER OUELLETTE - 3/29/2023
Graduate student W. Walker Smith converted the visible light given off by the elements into audio, creating unique, complex sounds for each one. His personal favorites are helium and zinc.
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—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. "Eventually, I stumbled across the visible spectra of the elements and I was overwhelmed by how beautiful and different they all look. I thought it would be really cool to turn those visible spectra, those beautiful images, into sound."
Data sonification is not a new concept. For instance, in 2018, scientists transformed NASA's image of Mars rover Opportunity on its 5,000th sunrise on Mars into music. The particle physics data used to discover the Higgs boson, the echoes of a black hole 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 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.
Markus Buehler's MIT lab famously mapped the molecular structure of proteins in spider silk threads onto musical theory to produce the "sound" of silk in hopes of establishing a radical new way to create designer proteins. The hierarchical elements of music composition (pitch, range, dynamics, tempo) are analogous to the hierarchical elements of protein structure. The lab even devised a way for humans to "enter" a 3D spider web and explore its structure both visually and aurally via a virtual reality setup. The ultimate aim is to learn to create similar synthetic spiderwebs and other structures that mimic the spider's process.
Several years later, Buehler's lab came up with an even more advanced system of making music out of a protein structure by computing the unique fingerprints of all the different secondary structures of proteins to make them audible via transposition—and then converting it back to create novel proteins never before seen in nature. The team also developed a free Android app called the Amino Acid Synthesizer so users could create their own protein "compositions" from the sounds of amino acids.
So Smith is in good company with his interactive periodic table project. All the elements release distinct wavelengths of light, depending on their electron energy levels, when stimulated by electricity or heat, and those chemical "fingerprints" make up the visible spectra at the heart of chemical spectroscopy. Smith translated those different frequencies of light into different pitches or musical notes using an instrument called the Light Soundinator 3000, scaling down those frequencies to be within the range of human hearing. He professed amazement at the sheer variety of sounds.
"Red light has the lowest frequency in the visible range, so it sounds like a lower musical pitch than violet," said Smith, demonstrating on a toy color-coded xylophone. "If we move from red all the way up to violet, the frequency of the light keeps getting higher, and so does the frequency of the sound. Violet is almost double the frequency of red light, so it actually sounds close to a musical octave." And while simpler spectra like hydrogen and helium, which only have a few lines in their spectra, sound like "vaguely musical" chords, elements with more complex spectra consisting of thousands of lines are dense and noisy, often sounding like "a cheesy horror movie effect," according to Smith.
His favorites: helium and zinc. "If you listen to the frequencies [of helium] one by one instead of all at once, you get an interesting scale pattern that I have used to make a couple of compositions, including a 'helium dance party,'" said Smith. As for zinc, "The first row of transition metals have very complex, dense grating sounds. But zinc, for whatever reason, despite having a large number of frequencies, sounds like an angelic vocalist singing with vibrato."
Smith is currently collaborating with the Wonder Lab Museum in Bloomington, Indiana, to develop a museum exhibit that would enable visitors to interact with the periodic table, listen to the laments, and make their own musical compositions from the various sounds. "The main thing I want to [convey] is that science and the arts aren't so different after all," he said. "Combining them can lead to new research questions, but also new ways to communicate and reach larger audiences."
Musical periodic table being built by turning chemical elements’ spectra into notes
BY REBECCA TRAGER
A researcher at Indiana University in the US, who just received a degree in music composition and chemistry, has turned elements’ spectra into haunting music.
W Walker Smith has built computer code to convert each element’s spectrum into a mixture of notes. He hopes that transforming the light into sound will make it easier to detect elemental differences, and also help to teach chemistry. Smith reported this first step toward creating an interactive, musical periodic table at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) on 26 March.
Previously, Smith converted the natural vibrations of molecules into a musical composition, and during that process he observed the spectra of elements. ‘I was always looking for a way to turn my chemistry research into music, eventually I stumbled across the visible spectra of the elements and I just was overwhelmed by how beautiful, gorgeous and how different they all look,’ he recalled during a briefing at the ACS meeting. ‘And I thought “Wow, it would be really cool to turn these beautiful spectra, these beautiful images, into sounds”.’
Every element gives off a unique set of wavelengths of light when excited, with brightness levels that are specific to each element – its spectrum. The wavelengths of light emitted by each element can be hard to differentiate from one another, however, especially for the transition metals because they can have thousands of individual colours. Smith hopes his work will provide a new way to interpret elements’ spectra.
Other scientists have turned chemistry into sound before. In 2019, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology assigned each of the 20 common amino acids a note on the C minor scale to create a composition unique to each protein. In another instance, the brightest wavelengths in an element’s spectrum were assigned to single notes played on piano keys. But that method produced just a few sounds that didn’t reflect the multitude of different wavelengths that some elements emit, Smith said. So, he decided to create his computer code to allow these notes to be generated in real time, forming harmonies and beating patterns as they combined.
Simpler elements like hydrogen and helium sound like chords, while others have a more complex collection of noises. Calcium, for instance, sounds like bells chiming together, while zinc sounds ‘angelic’, according to Smith. His two favourites are zinc and helium, which he described as a ‘groovy, very fun’ scale pattern when listened to one-by-one instead of all at once.
Previous research from a team at Nova University Lisbon in Portugal has found sonification to be very effective at helping students with visual impairments to interpret spectroscopic data, Smith noted. ‘But I think this goes even beyond that, because even for students that don’t have visual impairments, we could still use this as an alternative or supplementary means of data analysis, and perhaps glean some more information, or different types of information, from this spectra using our ears in addition to our eyes,’ he added.
In terms of next steps for his project, Smith is currently working with the WonderLab Museum of Science, Health and Technology in Bloomington, Indiana to develop an interactive exhibit that would allow visitors to listen to elements and make their own music with them.
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