The Sun Has Dropped Its Latest Album: Hear the “Lo-Fi Hip Hop” Sounds of Space
The Sun, our closest star, is a noisy place, filled with boiling and bubbling gases. However, since sound waves can’t travel in space, we can’t hear it. But, scientists have recently converted three years’ worth of solar flares into an audio-visual clip, allowing us to hear what the Sun “sounds” like.
The clip, created by the European Space Agency (ESA), using data from its British-built Solar Orbiter probe, uses a process called “sonification” to give us an idea of what the Sun’s sounds might be like. The result is a lo-fi, ambient track that might remind you of “lo-fi hip hop radio – beats to relax/study to.”
The solar flares, which occur when the Sun’s magnetic field twists and releases a burst of energy and charged particles, are depicted as blue circles in the video. These flares become more powerful as the Sun enters the peak of its 11-year cycle, known as the solar maximum, when its magnetic poles flip.
The frequencies of the solar flares are too low for humans to hear, but by using sonification, the ESA has given us a glimpse into what they might sound like. The video’s accompanying audio is based on the detected flares and the spacecraft’s distance from the Sun. The sharpness of the sound corresponds to the energy of the solar flare.
Klaus Nielsen, an artist specializing in lo-fi, ambient indietronica, created the sonification. The process of turning data into sound is a “smart way of making complex data accessible to public audiences,” says Dr. Adam Stanović, a programme director at the University of the Arts London’s London College of Communication.
Dr. Stanović notes that the sonification “allows us to hear the musicality of the data” and says that the track “provides a really clear sense of how frequently the solar flares occur and how varied they can be in terms of their size and strength.” The Solar Orbiter gets closest to the Sun every six months, which is why the track goes from low humming to glitchy lo-fi.
The Sun’s recently entered the peak of its 11-year cycle, which is why we’ve seen the Northern Lights so often recently. Nielsen has previously done an “scary” audio installation on what the Earth’s magnetic field sounds like, while Nasa has sonified a black hole.
Space is undoubtedly a weird place, and the ESA’s “lo-fi hip hop” sounds of the Sun are just the latest example of its quirkiness.
