New song imagines sensation of falling into a black hole

A Canadian ensemble began a performance this year with slow and suspenseful notes that gradually increased in tempo. As the musicians neared the end of the song a few minutes later, the sounds from different instruments began overlapping in a repetitive rhythm. Loud notes came from cellos and glockenspiels until the song abruptly ended on a high-pitched piano key.

The tune was meant to represent what traveling through the center of the Milky Way might feel like.

Over the past few years, NASA has tried to convey images of space through sound so that even people who are blind or vision impaired can imagine what the galaxy looks and feels like. But because the scientists didn’t know how to write sheet music, they were unable to accommodate musicians who wanted to play songs inspired by NASA’s work.

That was until composer Sophie Kastner recently used NASA’s data and images to create her own song depicting the sensation of traveling through the Galactic Center, which is about 26,000 lightyears from Earth. She collaborated with a Canadian ensemble to perform it, and the recording was released online last month.

Kastner hoped to create a sense of vastness and awe at the start of the song to represent journeying past stars. But as the imaginary traveler nears a black hole, Kastner hoped to leave listeners in fear and with curiosity about the size of the universe.

“Doing this made me realize that being a scientist and being an artist aren’t that different,” Kastner, 27, said. “We’re all just making sense of the universe, and this is one way of doing it.”

Kimberly Arcand, a visualization scientist at NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., has been translating images from NASA’s Chandra, Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes into sounds since 2020. After one video of NASA’s interpretation of sounds from a black hole went viral last year, a social media commenter called the noises “Cosmic horror.”

No one knows exactly what space sounds like because there’s no air in space for sound to travel through. But Arcand uses a coding program to play sounds that reproduce a mood or vibe based on the telescope imagery. Through the program, bright areas of an image are coded with highpitched noises, and congested areas are represented by lowpitched noises.

As part of the project, NASA combined telescope images from roughly 400 light-years of the Milky Way into a single picture. In September 2020, NASA created its own interpretation of the Milky Way’s sounds, starting from the left side of the picture. The video played high-pitched notes early on before the melody became faster near the black hole on the right side of the image that appears as a bright spot.

But Arcand, the NASA visualization scientist, wanted musicians to be able to play her music, so in the spring of 2022, she asked Kastner — the daughter of her colleague — to write sheet music based on the Milky Way picture. Kastner, who was about to graduate at the time from Montreal’s McGill University with a master’s degree in music composition, said before that, she had mainly composed songs for operas.

Kastner said that NASA’s sounds from the image were difficult to translate into sheet music, and that she felt the result was convoluted for a listener to follow. Kastner suggested a new idea: She could create her own song.

Using NASA’s interpretation of the sounds as a guide, Kastner said she simplified, adjusted and lengthened the tune in hopes of creating a song that would portray a story about traveling through the Galactic Center.

After finishing seven sheets of music in May, Kastner was nervous about how the song would sound. In June, seven musicians and a conductor from Ensemble Éclat, a music group based in Montreal, gathered in McGill’s recording facility for a rehearsal.

Kastner said listening to the song for the first time was the “best feeling ever.”

The next month, the musicians returned to the studio. Arcand, who had never imagined her project would influence in-person performances, said she was overjoyed when the musicians emailed her a recording later that month.

“It felt a little avant-garde, which the universe is,” said Arcand, 47. She hopes this is only the beginning of musicians adapting NASA’s music.

“This might sound odd to someone else — trying to translate massive data into something we can play on the flutes, on the violin,” Arcand said. “… But to me, it’s such an interesting form of expression of the scientific data.”