The Stellar Choir
The Stellar Choir is an interactive choir of roughly 8,500 "singing" stars that has been built from an early data release of star light curves by NASA's Kepler Mission. These curves were discarded as targets for the search of extra solar planets because of their high degree of variability. To build the sounds, a day of light measures was compresed into a second of sinusouidal sound; and changes in light flux were translated into changes in the pitch of the sound. Find more details about how the choir was built in the History section.
The Stellar Choir has been recently included in the Official NASA Kepler Mission website, in both the sections of Education and Audio Gallery.
Instructions:
- The sky map below displays the region of the sky surveyed by the Kepler spacecraft.
- The blue squares plot the limits of the field of vision (FOV) of Kepler's 42-CCD array.
- There is a red marker on the astronomical coordinates of each of the variable stars whose light curve was converted into sound -note how the star field is more populated at the left of the FOV.
- For each star, the light curve from which the sound has been built appears when the mouse pointer is placed over the corresponding marker. Note that large zooms are required to distinguish most markers individually.
- Press a marker to play the corresponding sound. A player will appear below the map and the sound will be played automatically. After a sound is finished, it can be played again by pressing the corresponding button in the player.
- Up to 4 sounds can be played simultaneously (resulting in a 4-part polyphony musical texture).
- The same sound can be loaded multiple times (round, or unison imitative counterpoint) by pressing several times the same marker.
- Press the Reset button to go back to the initial state.
- To minimize the server traffic and loading times, a partial version of the Stellar Choir containing a random selection of 1000 stars is shown by default. If you want to load the full version (8441 stars!), click here.