This music composition is an exercise in scale. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in Louisiana is very large. It is comprised of two perpendicular 4 km-long laser tubes. When a significantly strong gravity wave arrives, it causes the length of a laser tube to change by a minuscule fraction. This change in length is recorded 4096 times/sec and can be interpreted as a sound file. The sound of the gravity wave is buried in measurement noise but can be extracted through signal analysis.

The Raspberry Pi is a small computer that can nonetheless make billions of computations per second. In this work, the sound of computation is obtained by measuring the voltages on a multi-pin memory bus. In real-time, the Raspberry Pi boots up, analyses the signal of a gravity wave, and sonifies this process. Finally, the work concludes with the playback of the sound of the gravity wave detector noise and an imagined chorus of gravity waves.




Data provided by LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration.
Visit https://www.gw-openscience.org/ for more info.