Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

Opportunity views sunrise on Mars.
Credit: NASA/JPL

NASA’s Opportunity Mars rover has been silent, perhaps temporarily, following a dust-up with the Red Planet.

But researchers have created the soundtrack of the 5,000th Mars sunrise captured by Opportunity using “data sonification” techniques to create a two-minute piece of music.

Pixel by pixel

The piece of music was produced by scanning a picture from left to right, pixel by pixel, and looking at brightness and color information and combining them with terrain elevation. They used algorithms to assign each element a specific pitch and melody.

Tuning up to Mars, Domenico Vicinanza of Anglia Ruskin University.
Credit: Domenico Vicinanza

The maestros of Mars, Domenico Vicinanza of Anglia Ruskin University and Genevieve Williams of the University of Exeter will present the world premiere of the piece, entitled Mars Soundscapes in the NASA booth at the forthcoming Supercomputing SC18 Conference in Dallas next week.

The piece will be presented using both conventional speakers and vibrational transducers so the audience could feel the vibrations with their hands, thus enjoying a first-person experience of a sunrise on Mars.

Mars soundscapes.
Credit: Domenico Vicinanza

Flexible technique

In a press statement, Vicinanza, Director of the Sound and Game Engineering (SAGE) research group at Anglia Ruskin noted:

“Image sonification is a really flexible technique to explore science and it can be used in several domains, from studying certain characteristics of planet surfaces and atmospheres, to analyzing weather changes or detecting volcanic eruptions.”

In health science for example, Vicinanza says it can provide scientists with new methods to analyze the occurrence of certain shapes and colors, which is particularly useful in image diagnostics.

Give a listen to this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loXhsglsG-w&feature=youtu.be