What is the Soniverse?
The Soniverse is an exploration of a universe made of sound … not a universe described in sound or illustrated with it, but one whose physics is built from sound itself, or reframed from the mathematics of cosmologies. It explores an acoustic cosmology where the fundamental particle is a single wavelength (a ‘sonon’), where repetition can create gravity.
In exploring this idea, we create lots of different directions, ideas, sonifications, models, and interpretations of data, physics, maths as well as our intellectual and emotional responses to them. This site is one aspect of the work, and includes:
- ideas
- stories (e.g. how we made things, collaborations, reflections)
- development of mathematical modes, interpretations of astrophysics, and their implementation in code, sonifications and visualisations
- invention and development of soniverse instruments
- sonic examples & interactive tools
- performances & presentations
- research papers
Research covers Acoustic Cosmology and some of the thinking around it.
Tools range from simple sonifications to ‘Soniverse Engines’. These include playable instruments such as the application of cosmological models to sound, or sonon-based cosmologies re-rendered into sonifications and visulalisations. For example, listening to two objects at different redshifts and follow one from the big bang to now, scatter grains of sound across a gravitational field, or turn a patch of sky into a chord.
Music, art & creative outputs
Gavin uses the work created here in the creation of music, visual and physical media, often in open collaboration with others. There’s a strong feedback loop between the creation of artistic works and the exploration of research. Gavin’s music site is https://binarydust.org
A bit of background
For centuries, Musica Universalis imagined the cosmos as harmony: the planets as notes, their orbits as intervals. This is sometimes called the ‘Music of the Spheres’. We were curious if there might be a modern-day equivalent: a ‘Music of the Hypersphere’.
With Acoustic Cosmology, instead of mapping the universe onto music, we ask if we can build a self-consistent universe from music’s smallest part. That part is the sonon: one wavelength, the equivalent of a photon in a sonic universe.
Sonons exist in superposition of sonic or musical states until they are heard; the listener is the observer, and hearing is a rendering of the ‘measurement’. Time has three independent dimensions: the wavelength itself, the life of an instrument, and the length of a performance. Sonons that repeat attract one another, and this temporal gravity clusters them into mass, which is what classical music calls a phrase. Clusters bend the wave-time around them, as matter bends spacetime. There is redshift, entropy, curvature, an epoch.
Some of these relationships are causal: the physics holds together on its own terms, using the real mathematics of cosmology with the speed of sound in place of the speed of light. Some are aesthetic: they describe how the result feels. Both kinds matter here.
In the beginning there was nothing, and then there was noise.
Read a more detailed view in Gavin’s Introduction
People
The Soniverse is led by Gavin Starks, a musician/artist and astrophysicist, in long collaboration with Prof Andrew Newsam, Professor of Astronomy Education and Engagement at Liverpool John Moores University and Director of the National Schools’ Observatory, who has developed many sonification tools and soniverse models.
Gavin would also like to thank Andy for his considerable patience in listening to, interpreting and re-explaining so many (let’s just say ‘creative’) questions :).
Contact: music@dgen.net
Collaboration
Collaboration is a huge part of any research, creative and exploratory work. Some, of many, are listed below.
Direct creative collaborations
- Honor Harger (RT32)
- Ulyana Gumeniuk (work in development)
- Adrian Philpott (visual creative)
- Tom Middleton (REDSHIFT)
Ideas: Peter Clive (piano and cosmology), Aidan Keane and Andrew Conway (cosmology), Jaako Mattila (artist)