Now Listen To Music Driven From Real Field Data - MIT Media Lab Unveils Quantizer

Researchers at MIT Media Lab are well known for their out of the box thinking. Their dedicated efforts have contributed in revolutionizing the present era of modern technology. Recently, they have come up with another one of such implication that combines the two fields – Science and Arts and harnesses a musical symphony out of it. Their next big offering is a Quantizer – a platform which uses real field data and converts them into music!


Quantizer is a sonification engine that converts raw data into music in real time. With the help of it, data sets are shifted to audible musical scales. Its team has collaborated with the CERN’S ATLAS team and has successfully converted a subset of data obtained from the LHC into an audible composition. It identifies high energy data sets and converts them into a series of notes in audible range. The main purpose of this was to connect the non-technical audiences with the effectiveness or the importance of the work which is undergoing in LHC. Since, LHC is associated with finding out the reasons behind the origin of the universe, the musical piece can also be thought of as the music of the universe.


Juliana Cheraton and her professor Joe Paradiso, the lead researchers of Quantizer are very much interested in obtaining the sounds from the physics data. To understand the science better in any way possible is what their aim lies in. However, they are highly enthusiastic in demonstrating the way it works. Their paper, which is based on their work and analysis of the datasets obtained from the LHC has been presented in the CHI conference recently and both technical and non-technical audiences have appreciated it.


Quantizer, as stated earlier, acts like a tool for the composers and provides them best data sets to sonify. They are working with the ATLAS team and some composers whose main objective is to correlate the data obtained from the LHC with musical notes. Representing the data obtained from the world’s largest particle accelerator and collider into a musical symphony is really a big achievement as it offers a novel way for everyone to connect with the data and their characteristics.

Emerging composers now have a completely new platform to correlate data and obtain new compositions. Within just one month of its release, it has attracted the attention of many and thus the team has succeeded in achieving their efforts. They will further represent their updated work in July at the NIME (New Interfaces in Musical Expression) global gathering and it is expected that more new domains of science will be covered with the help of it.

Watch this video to get an overview of Quantizer -

Source - Music of the (data) spheres | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | #-Link-Snipped-#| #-Link-Snipped-#