The God Particle Music

Instead of looking for the Higgs Boson, the so-called God Particle, in experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, what if you could listen for it instead?

That's what particle physicist Lily Asquith of University College London and colleagues were thinking about when they created LHCsound, where they convert data from the particle collider into musical notes:

Where do the sounds come from?

The sound samples on this site are made from real and simulated data from the ATLAS detector. Simulated data is used by physicists to determine, for example, what a Higgs Boson decay is going to look like in real data.

How is the data converted into sounds?

The data is first processed using the vast and all-powerful ATLAS software framework. This allows raw data (streams of ones and zeroes) to be converted step-by-step into ‘objects’ such as silicon detector hits and energy deposits. We can reconstruct particles using these objects. The next step is to convert the information into a file containing two or three columns of numbers known as a "breakpoint file". It can also be used as a "note list". This kind of file can be read by compositional software such as the Composers Desktop Project (CDP) and Csound software used for this project.

Well, reading about it is nice, but listening to the sounds is much more awesome:

Detector sweep on marimba:

Higgs Jet Simple

Higgs Jet Simple Slow Tempo

Detector Sweet with Momentum

Top Quark Jet

Higgs Jet Energy Gate

Apparently, God is a fan of Marimba music.

See also:

I Survive the Large Hadron Collider T-Shirt - $9.95