Jarrell Pair

Data sonification has been viewed as a tool with great potential for studying complex sets of scientific data.  Sonification can provide the researcher with the ability to perceive variations and trends that are invisible to more established data analysis techniques.   However, few have explored the potential artistic applications of sonification.   In 1996, I worked with Alec Robinson to use Matlab and Csound to prototype software to transduce data from various sources such as images, temperature, and light intensity into aesthetically pleasing audio. We used this work to develop the audio effects for StarChild. Using Csound and a custom C program, astronomical data from the Shoemaker Levy-9 comet collision was used as input to create audio for portions of StarChild.   Additionally, images of the collisions with Jupiter were transduced into audio effects using Hyperupic, an application running on a NeXT computer.

440k MP3 file (low sample rate) taken from the sample files created from the comet collision