Yandex Music announces today The Sound of Stars, a playlist of audio compositions celebrating the 60th anniversary of the first human flight into space.
To create the playlist, the Yandex Music team used algorithms to convert the physical properties of stars, pulsars and galaxies into music, with each of the nine tracks dedicated to a specific astronomical object. The audio journey across the universe begins with the Sun and ends 53.5 million light-years away from the Earth, in the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy M87.
“When we watch sci-fi films, the sounds of space are either menacing and disturbing, or ambient abstract music, but this is just someone’s fantasy. No one really knows what the background music would be if sound could travel through space, so we thought, why not try and apply technology to create our own fantasy? The result is The Sound of Starsplaylist, which can take our users on a musical cosmic journey of their own,” says Andrey Gevak, head of Yandex Music.
Yandex Music used sonification methods to turn specific astrophysical parameters, such as brightness or motion of a celestial body, into sound properties, such as frequency or amplitude. The numeric values of each parameter were converted into corresponding musical notes, and a professional musician selected harmonic movements, instruments and sound effects to finally create the ten celestial tracks in The Sound of Stars playlist.
The melody of the ‘Sun’ is based on the frequency of solar flares over the past 60 years. ‘Eclipsing Star’ is a waltz, where two melodies revolve around each other, just like the two parts of the double star Beta Lyra. ‘Galaxy’ is the actual photo of the galaxy NGC 2442 in the Flying Fish constellation converted into data and fed into a spectral acoustic synthesizer. The new Yandex Music collection also has a bonus track (In Russian) with musicians, programmers, astronomers, and other experts discussing the connection between technology and creativity.
The Yandex Music team collaborated with professional astrophysicists to create The Sound of Stars using astronomical data from the RadioAstron Project of the Astro Space Center at the Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO), the Space Weather Forecasting Center (SWPC) Roscosmos, and NASA. The playlist also includes commentary by scientists (in Russian) and short looped videos representing the celestial bodies used to create each track.
The Sound of Stars isn’t the first experimental music created with Yandex technologies. Yandex Music released its parametric debut album, Nonhuman Music, in 2019, composed by human musicians in combination with a neural network. In 2016, Yandex released Neural Defense, an album inspired by the work of Yegor Letov with lyrics written by a neural network.
