Artists should always think of themselves as cosmic instruments for storytelling. -- Ted Lange
Science and music are natural bedfellows, particularly with the rise in popularity of sonification techniques: a way of translating data into audible sounds, making it possible to "hear" the "voices" of volcanoes, a black hole, Cassiopeia A, and the rings of Saturn, for example. The latter even inspired a symphony, performed by the Kronos Quartet.
Now composer Alexis Kirke of the University of Plymouth's Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research, has collaborated with the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, England to create a duet between a live violinist and radioactive subatomic particles produced inside a cloud chamber.
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Finding ways to make the invisible, visible, is the reason why cloud chambers were invented: scientists were looking for a means of detecting and imaging cosmic rays, first discovered by Victor Hess in 1912 during a balloon experiment.
Hess expected to find a decrease of ionization in the atmosphere with increasing altitude. Instead, he found just the opposite, and concluded there must be radiation entering our atmosphere from space.
But how to see them? Cloud chambers were invented by Scottish physicist Charles Thomas Rees Wilson in 1895 at Cambridge University's famed Cavendish Laboratory. Wilson was interested in the weather and wanted a means of reproducing the condensation of clouds in the laboratory (original apparatus shown below).
This happens as the result of a sudden expansion of the volume of some closed vessel filled with air saturated with water vapor. Said expansion causes a drop in temperature, and makes the air supersaturated, resulting in condensation.
Wilson explored how ions serve as nuclei for water droplets, and even began photographing the formation of those droplets.
By 1910, Wilson had figured out he could use his cloud chamber device to detect charged particles, since they would leave a trail of ions -- and water droplets -- as they passed through the gas in the chamber.
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He took the very first photographs of the tracks left by alpha and beta rays. Both alpha and beta particles have distinctive tracks: the former is broad and straight, while the latter is thinner and more easily deflected by collisions with other particles. Apply a uniform magnetic field across the cloud chamber, and positively and negatively charged particles will curve in opposite directions.
Cloud chambers have long since been eclipsed in particle physics by other, more advanced technologies, but they are a staple of science museums, like San Francisco's Exploratorium, and a perennial favorite for science projects.
(You can learn how to build your own cloud chamber here and here; all you need, really, is a sealed container, an alcohol source, some dry ice, and a radioactive source, like cosmic rays.)
And now Kirke is using a cloud chamber containing radium 225 to meld particle physics and music. Two of his colleagues, Anna Troisi and Antonino Chiaramonte, worked with center head Eduardo Miranda to device a visual-recognition-to-sound interface that they dubbed the Cloud Catcher, capable of functioning in real time. And professional violinist John Matthias, who has played with Radiohead and Coldplay, provided the human part of the equation. Per Wired:
"In the duet, a camera above a cloud chamber follows the particle tracks and converts them into synthesized music, which accompanies the violin.... An amplified version of the violin part was also sent to an electromagnetic field system positioned near the particles. Thus Matthias' playing creates a variable force field in the chamber, influencing the way the particles behave. This ensures that the duet between radioactive particles and violinist is as dynamic as possible."
Who knew that subatomic particles could make such beautiful music -- with a little help from their human friends?
Tags: Particle Physics, Particles, Physics
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