Science Museum’s The Sun: Solar Synthesis soundtrack
15 Oct 2018
For the Science Museum’s latest temporary exhibition, The Sun: Living With Our Star, we were asked to create numerous musical ‘islands’ throughout the exhibition. Often tied to a specific film or experience, these musical ‘islands’ had to function both as dedicated soundtracks, but also as soundscapes for the various thematic divisions of the exhibition.
Within this framework we were concerned to design the sound for all of the spaces in such a way that they were both idiosyncratic but also coherently threaded together in a novel but representative way.
Taking a cue from the exhibition narrative, which looks at how scientists have developed ways of analysing the sun in order to better understand its influence on our planet, we began to think about ways we might ‘sonify’ solar energy/radiation.
Our research led us to the VLF recordings of Stephen P. McGreevy, who has been using special equipment to record electromagnetic atmospheric events since 1989. Inspired by his recordings, we wondered whether we could find any Sun specific electromagnetic recordings that we could use in the exhibition. While we didn’t find any ‘recordings’ as such, we nevertheless did come across a lot of data.
Our breakthrough came when we realised that we could take small portions of this Sun data and turn it into ‘wavetables’ for use as a basis for synthesis. ‘Wavetable’ synthesis is a type of sound synthesis that allows the user to create their own waveform oscillator as the basis for generating sound. Different waveforms have different timbral qualities that can be useful for giving music it’s colour and texture.
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Many of the soundtracks we created for the exhibition feature wavetables we created using data from the sun used in various ways, either as the basis for synthesis or as modulators of other synthesizers.
In some small way then, as you walk through the exhibition, you are listening to sounds that have been made from patterns in the energy of the sun itself. You can listen to the results in the player below.
If you’d like to find out more about our museum sound design work or talk to us about a project, head over to our website here.
