Grateful Dead Percussionist Makes Music From Supernovas 57
At the "Cosmology At the Beach" conference earlier this month, Grammy-award winning percussionist Mickey Hart performed a composition inspired by the eruptions of supernovae. "Keith Jackson, a Berkeley Lab computer scientist who is also a musician, lent his talents to the project, starting with gathering data from astrophysicists like those at the Berkeley Lab’s Nearby Supernova Factory, which collects data from telescopes in space and on earth to quickly detect and analyze short-lived supernovas. 'If you think about it, it's all electromagnetic data — but with a very high frequency,' Jackson said of the raw data. "What we did is turn it into sound by slowing down the frequency and "stretching" it into an audio form. Both light and sound are all wave forms — just at different frequencies. Our goal was to turn the electromagnetic data into audio data while still preserving the science.'"
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Funny)
I presume he is spending a year dead for tax purposes.
Drums Space (Score:5, Funny)
Gives a new meaning to "Drums > Space".
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Funny)
Just in case you may not know this but "Grateful Dead" is the name of a rock band (now currently inactive due to forced retirement of most of the members) they are known for (being a 60s band) Skeletons, teddy bears and wild mixes of colors known as "tie dye".
Wikipedia know how to use it??
Actually, the robot did it. (Score:4, Funny)
The drummer was nowhere to be found. Frantic inquiries led to the discovery that he was standing on a beach on Santraginus V over a hundred light years away where, he claimed, he had been happy for half an hour now and had found a small stone that would be his friend.
The band's manager was profoundly relieved. It meant that for the seventeenth time on this tour the drums would be played by a robot and that therefore the timing of the cymballistics would be right.
DRM (Score:2, Funny)
Armageddon music (Score:3, Funny)
"Well, it IS sort of a downer that all these civilizations were just wiped out when their sun went nova and consumed their planets, and we feel for our extraterrestrial brethren. But on the bright side, check out this wicked drum solo I got out of it!"
DMCA (Score:3, Funny)
Oh great, now the universe is going to sue the pants off our planet.
you know (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Cool! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Score:3, Funny)
2 important questions:
I wonder if the album follows the traditional formula of boy-being meets girl-being under a beautiful astronomical body... which then explodes for no apparent reason?
and
Will Jerry be coming out of his tax shelter for the live tour?
Dark Star? (Score:3, Funny)
How about a brown dwarf. I wonder how closely they would match.
I think it would be funny though, if they did a red dwarf.
Re:Cool! (Score:5, Funny)
In other news, RIIA has just announced that they will be collecting a fee from every astronomer looking at a nova.