On Sunday 25 October, Tom Middleton and I presented REDSHIFT: Slow Down and Reconnect with Time at ARTIS Planetarium in Amsterdam.

It was made, as a 20-minute instance of an acoustic cosmology, for a room with no front: seats forming concentric rings beneath a 20m diameter dome.

It’s worth saying that twenty metres is huge: seeing the visuals at that engulfing scale, with a substantial sound system which shook the room, was really quite something. There are lots of scientific, mathematical and technical details, which I’ll cover in separate posts: this post is about its theme and narrative.

The piece is anchored around a period of time which takes us away from being engulfed by our surroundings and the noise of our contemporary worlds, into a moment of complete silence, stillness and blackness.

It begins with noise: a chaotic genesis that is both celebratory and complex. Initially, a single pixel fills our entire perspective, and evolves into quantum fluctuations from which a universe might emerge. 

Before asking us to slow down, we must reflect on something to slow down from. The noise of the opening is a carrier for the internal noise that everyone has arrived with.

Background

From 1993-1995, moving between astrophysics and computer music, and then working at Jodrell Bank, I started creating highly textural music that blended modelling, time-stretching and Western classical narratives.

A question emerged through this: is there a musical equivalent to the curvature of spacetime?

For me music, like mathematics, is a non-verbal language through which I can describe a set of relationships without having found words to express them. Acoustic cosmology is a way of exploring that gap: could we make a sonic universe with its own basic units, its own laws, and ways of changing the relationships between sounds? I defined its proposed basic unit a sonon: one wavelength—a model for making and thinking about music.

We have developed ways that let us hear galactic observational spectra, or listen to the mathematics of expanding universes, or spread gravitational wells across the frequency spectrum of a sound and let sonons fall into them. Some masses sound when a grain reaches them, others remain silent but still impact the paths and pitches of other grains around them. A dense wall of grains can be bent or partly absorbed, changing their texture and leaving gaps. This soniverse instrument lets us place black holes onto the frequency spectrum of a stream of sonic particles.

For REDSHIFT:, these tools form an ensemble of instruments in its compositional material.

The development of REDSHIFT: began with its narrative structure, using existing and new sonic instruments, composing some of the music for Tom to build upon, and creating all of the visuals. 

Tom fed into the narrative development, added his own compositions and orchestrations, mixed and processed the sound live on stage. As our first collaboration, it was a wonderfully symbiotic and constructive feedback loop. 

It’s worth mentioning (especially as it was raised in the audience Q&A) that I used ‘ai’ to create of some of the tools not content, which I then used to create the piece, as a way of helping develop a palette—but not in the creation of the actual piece or its narratives. There are many issues with ‘ai’, some of which the audience asked about during the panel, but I have little issue in getting it to write software that I can then use to try and express what’s in my head, or to create editing tools. I’ve been using, writing, and helping to build software that enables creative interpretation for over four decades, and see ai as a new toolbox. This is not to avoid the fact that ai/machine-learning is being used in negative ways, but that’s not for today.

Superpositions

The opening quantum fluctuations could have gone in many directions, but here they condense into a blend of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) with an image of our galactic plane. Both these images were captured using the ESA Planck spacecraft and represent very, very different scales: one is the ‘heat remnant’ imprint from the big bang and early universe, the other is the plane of the galaxy in which we live. The CMBR is the oldest light in the universe—a trace of the universe’s ‘becoming’ rather than an instant of creation.

As this image forms, our introduction narrative begins:

We are made… of time.
What noise have you brought into this room?
Noise that you carry from outside;
from within?

The question is about what arrives with us and, to disrupt our audience’s noise, we bring some heavy and challenging images in contrast to the serenity and grandeur of the space (partly inspired by my thoughts for friends in Ukraine): 

Can you imagine the sound
of an unborn child, listening,waiting;
of an undropped bomb;
of an unexpressed love.

In here, we explore ideas of superposition;
That which exists in multiple states before collapsing … into something real.
Whether quantum mechanics;  a feeling left unspoken; an idea, lingering

Superposition embodies the idea that many things are held in possibility, with very different meanings and wildly different emotional and practical consequences. I wanted to bring our more familiar experiences of the unexpressed into contact with the much stranger language of superposition, quantum mechanics, and our perceptions of time.

nothing is real … until it is uttered … or observed.
In the beginning there was nothing.  And then there was noise.
The utterance of a cosmology.

Our visuals develop into a large-scale galactic-scale structures with gravitational wells (e.g. black holes) distorting the field and visual echoes of wormholes. Some of the gravitational lensing adds pixellation; quantisation artefacts that reflect and question our perceptions of spatial and temporal resolution. These are challenging ideas. Our sounds follow a downward spiral, a continuous slide in frequency, with Soniverse artefacts contributing to a redshifted departure: a distance measured in tone, colour and pitch.

Before the Big Bang,  there was no space, no time, no sound.
We were even… pre-silence.
Before there was a topology, there could be no sound.
Even silence had no meaning.

Our time, our space, are  shaped by our mass, creating gravity that pulls us… 

Let us step back.

In astronomy, redshift occurs when objects are moving away from us, stretching wavelengths and lowering frequencies (as a siren does when an ambulance is travelling away from us).

The visual tools I developed gave me ways to work with fields, data and parameters rather than ‘literal’ objects: enabling the shaping of particulate densities, filaments, clusters, gravitational intensity and moving the image through different gravitational wells. This was a very involved feedback loop; to discover which relationships could become effective in the piece rather than simply ‘lots of different controls’.

The structure moves through redshift towards blackness, rotating anticlockwise (both an unwinding, and the orientation of Earth’s spin looking down from the north pole). It is an decompression into silence; descending sound and fading image leads us into the silence of the work.

Descent into pre-time 

In the middle of REDSHIFT: there is a period of complete audio silence and total blackness.

On one level, it is a very ordinary moment: a moment of quiet, where we spend time waiting for things, checking things, passing between things.

Here it is a moment to stop, after the complexity of the genesis and audio-visual descent, we are left with no markers. I announce to the audience to expect such a moment, so they do not think the piece has finished, but I do not reveal its duration, deliberately: this is a provocation, an empty unknown.

I’m interested in what happens to our relationship with time when the material that has been focusing and organising our attention is withdrawn: are we left adrift? is one’s mind left spinning? have we slowed enough to enjoy the peace within the piece? The period is there to be encountered, without knowing how long it will last: has those in the room had the same experiences as each other? Our earlier question, “What noise have you brought into this room?” remains open, unanswered.

Returning to a changed space

Large-scale galactic structure emerges from blackness into a faint blueshift; gravitational wells return; sounds rise in frequency, rotation is clockwise. But the macrostructure has changed: we are not running the descent backwards to return to where we were. There are new visual echoes of the Laniakea Supercluster and the Lahaina Noon Sky Gate. An organ sounds.

We emerge into a Poincaré dodecahedral spacetime with multiple echoes of Earth against a visible grid, with deep organ sounds and bright textures, bringing us back into a celebration of our present, our future, but with questions of our perceptions of time remaining.

I’ve been a fan of Luminet’s wraparound universe for a long time. It’s a Poincaré dodecahedral space that was proposed as a potential cosmological topology: a twelve-faced cell whose faces are joined. Looking through one face can bring another view of the same space back to you. The repeated Earths used in the piece echo the fact that our potential models of time and space are as infinite as the number of ways that different humans might interpret them.

When you understand the fundamentals of cosmology, you can’t unlearn them: our place in the universe is both insignificant, significant, and overwhelming, it’s hard to truly process, and fundamental to our comprehension of our origins.

In our return, we ask what are the shapes of time that we can explore, what is our place within them, we make the familiar object of our Earth appear within an entirely unfamiliar organisation of space. What are the infinity of ways in which can we imagine our relationship with time?

The dodecahedral grid makes that organisation visible for a while, then fades but leaving the topology: its topology is unseen yet visible through its interactions. This is an important part of the passage—a topology made visible, echoed in sound, but the relationship is less directly obvious, movement continues to give glimpses of encountering structure, but only if we are observing (listening, watching).

Becoming Earth

Earth emerges through our topology; satellite transmissions pulse around our ears with visual echoes of the CMBR remnant. As the view moves closer, we transition ‘inside’ Earth,  transformed by the topology we have been exploring: an insider’s view of a perspective that can never be experienced in our real world.

As our Earth morphs out of the Poincaré topology into its recognisable state and recedes, its colours move from a dark blue night (ESA-sourced) image towards the familiar green and blue: we transition from night to day. 

As we return from redshift … through blueshift.
Through an infinity of mirrored topologies
As we slow down,
can we take a step closer?

While the image moves away, the narration ask us to come closer—whereas in the beginning we were asked to step back, can we now find a different way of considering what is near? The place we inhabit and the people with whom we inhabit it, those next to us.

Can you see yourself as not the only thing
holding time,
seeing time,
being time?

REDSHIFT: brings many scales of time into focus in one piece, from the short duration of a sound grain to the big bang, from galactic evolution to topological disruption, from the twenty minutes of the piece to the deep time embodied in the CMBR, to the human time of being in a room beside other people, waiting for the next moment.

In the script I attempt to hold these scales together without explaining away the music or visuals. In opening, I asked what we have brought with us, in closing I ask how you have felt time, and whether looking beyond our own time might bring us closer into our shared present; to be present.

‘Temporal restoration’ is an invitation to think differently about time, to step back, to listen, to pause, to attend differently to pace, space, duration, noise, signals, and to those who sit next to us.

Our time
Deep time
A step towards
A temporal restoration

Finally our Earth recedes towards a Pale Blue Dot (a nod to this truly spectacularly humbling image). 

Credits

We presented Redshift and participated in the panel discussion with the support of the Museum of Consciousness as part of Signals: Hearing a Changing Planet, presented by EarthSonic, ARTIS (https://www.artis.nl/en/artis-zoo/daily-schedule/signals-hearing-a-changing-planet) and ADE Arts & Culture with support from the European Space Agency.

My thanks to Tom for the music and collaboration, to Andy for the questions and demonstrations that have accompanied this work for so long, and to EarthSonic, ARTIS, ADE, ESA and the Museum of Consciousness for inviting us into this setting.

The Museum of Consciousness presents:

Join Tom Middleton and Gavin Starks for REDSHIFT:, a 20-minute acoustic cosmology for our temporal restoration. REDSHIFT: is a new collaboration between Gavin Starks and Tom Middleton.

Event Details: https://amsterdam-dance-event.nl/en/program/2026/signals-hearing-a-changing-planet/2854968/
Tickets: https://artis.nl/en/artis-zoo/daily-schedule/signals-hearing-a-changing-planet

Follow Tom on Insta

Follow Gavin on Insta, BSky, Mastadon, LinkedIn, Threads

EVENT

Signals: Hearing a Changing Planet

EarthSonic, ARTIS and ADE Arts & Culture, with the support of the European Space Agency, present:

What if we could not only see how our planet is changing, but hear it?

For more than fifty years, satellites have been observing Earth, generating an extraordinary archive of data about our changing planet. In Signals: Hearing a Changing Planet, science, sound and visual art come together to transform that data into an experience that can be felt as well as understood.

The programme brings together artists, scientists and cultural thinkers to explore what happens when real Earth observation data becomes a source for music, sound and moving image. Following immersive audiovisual performances inspired by data from the European Space Agency, a live conversation asks how art can translate complex scientific stories into experiences that resonate beyond the world of science, and whether hearing and seeing the planet differently can inspire new ways of thinking and acting.

Presented by EarthSonic, ARTIS and ADE Arts & Culture, with the support of the European Space Agency, the programme moves between sonic exploration, audiovisual performance and conversation, creating a journey from data to emotion, and from observation to action.

19:30 – doors open

20:00 – start time

Be on time: Strictly no access after the start of the show.

Programme:

REDSHIFT: Slow Down and Reconnect with Time, The Museum of Consciousness presents Tom Middleton and Gavin Starks – A 20-minute acoustic cosmology of the planet, using ESA earth-observation data as source material for temporal restoration.

Signals: Hearing a Changing Planet: Panel discussion with Joey Dean (Natural Symphony) · Ruth Daniel (EarthSonic/ADE) · Jamie Franklin (Roland) · Dirk Schuettemeyer (European Space Agency) · Matthew Russell (The Interplanetary Podcast) · Gavin Starks

Moderator: Professor Carl Hayden Smith (Museum of Consciousness)

Halina Rice: Audiovisual performance with the support of the European Space Agency

Natural Symphony: Audiovisual performance with the support of the European Space Agency

Signals: Hearing a Changing Planet

EarthSonic, ARTIS and ADE Arts & Culture, with the support of the European Space Agency, present:

Signals: Hearing a Changing Planet: Panel discussion with Joey Dean (Natural Symphony) · Ruth Daniel (EarthSonic/ADE) · Jamie Franklin (Roland) · Dirk Schuettemeyer (European Space Agency) · Matthew Russell (The Interplanetary Podcast) · Gavin Starks
Moderator: Professor Carl Hayden Smith (Museum of Consciousness)
Halina Rice: Audiovisual performance with the support of the European Space Agency
Natural Symphony: Audiovisual performance with the support of the European Space Agency

Featuring @halinarice_music @naturalsymphonylive at @artis.amsterdam with support of @europeanspaceagency
#ADE2026 #EarthSonic #amsterdamdanceevent #electronicmusic #climateaction #soniverse

Generate sounds from Digitized Sky Survey data using sonification techniques

Examples

Outline
SonifyDSS is python code that using sonification techniques to turn FITS data from the Digitized Sky Survey 2 collected from the NASA SkyView system (https://skyview.gsfc.nasa.gov) into sounds. It is focussed on generating sounds for composition or exploring data and so is highly configurable.

It is command-line based system and requires a modicum of experience of python.

The Sonification technique:
The sonfication technique maps from image brightness of a single pixel to volume of a particular frequency.

So, given a selection of image data from the DSS a line can be chosen across the image and all the pixels along that line allocated to different frequencies (with low frequency at one end, high frequency at the other). A sine wave at each frequency is generated with the amplitude determined by the brightness of the pixel and all the sine waves combined to produce a short sound.

The line can then be moved around the image data, producing a different pattern of pixels and hence a different sound. That is then appended to the previous sound and so on to create a sound of arbitrary length.

To generate stereo sounds, Red DSS2 survey data is used for the left channel and the Blue DSS2 data for the right.

What the code does

The software enables:

• A particular piece of the sky to be downloaded from the DSS surveys.
• A line to be “swept” across the data in a particular direction (top-to-bottom, circularly etc).
• The sounds generated to be combined into a single audio file of chosen duration.
• Optionally the code can also produce an image showing the DSS data and/or a movie showing the line “sweeping” over the image data (see the Examples)

https://github.com/AstroAndyN/SonifyDSS

sonon (n): one wavelength ∂s
The equivalent of a photon in a sonic universe (soniverse)

Over the past 20 years, my stupid, grasping mind has trying to find ways to combine music and cosmology. This began with writing music that I (and others) have struggled to describe verbally.

When I first stumbled into the methods of creating this highly textural form, I knew I’d laid the foundations for all the music I would write in the future. It was a moment I found so exciting I had to immediately find a phone box (yes, that long ago) to call my friend Andy to tell him. We have collaborated ever since.

For me, music, like mathematics, is a non-verbal language. It is experiential.

A theme for me seems to be, to begin with creating common languages. This work has evolved to explore the articulation and progression in musical language, one that has mirrored our understanding of the universe for centuries. I’ve tried to show this evolution, in broad terms, in the image above.

We used to believe there was a fundamental relationship between the distances between the planets and music. We called this Musica Universalis or ‘Music of the Spheres’. We know now there isn’t a causal relationship, but our emotional relationship with this idea remains profoundly powerful.

My question was ‘is there an equivalent in contemporary physics and electronic music?’. Is there a ‘Music of the Hypersphere’? Or, bringing in more specific language, is there an ‘Acoustic cosmology in Hilbert Space’. You might also ask ‘What is the shape of music?’.

My explorations led me to try and find relationships (mathematical, or experiential, not causal) between the mathematics used in astrophysics (specifically cosmology and quantum mechanics) and the codified mathematics-as-algorithms in the realms of computer- and electronic-music. For those who understand science and/or music, some of this will make no sense in either of those domains. This is intended: we are exploring. This isn’t a small project.

We can draw interesting parallels between the macro-languages of music over centuries and the evolution of our understanding of the complexity of the universe.

Starting about a thousand years ago, with PITCH and DURATION in monophonic music (polyphony was considered ungodly), through to the development of HARMONY in baroque to the ROMANTIC and COMPLEX symphony into REDUCTIONIST music-concrete, and the ATOMISED computer-music to the contemporary GENERATIVE algorave, we can see clear parallels between the language used to describe our perception of the universe and the words used to describe music.

Our latest iterations can reduce the sonic universe (soniverse) to a set of fundamental equations (the equivalents to Maxwell’s equations) from which all other sounds can be produced. From additive synthesis to neural network-generated chart hits, it seems to me that these very different worlds form part of our convergence of understanding: art and science are reconvening.

This had led me to ask: is there a musical equivalent to the CURVATURE of space-time? Can we operate natively in a frequency, rather than a time-based domain? What might DIMENSIONALITY mean in a wave-time cosmology?

My hypothesis is to test if there exists and/or if we can create a soniverse in which the language of science is relevant. It may be relevant in a causal sense (for example, the physics may be self-referentially consistent). It may be relevant aesthetically (for example, it may describe a subjective musical construct). Our first principle is to create a fundamental particle, which I will call a sonon — the equivalent to a photon in this sonic universe (and not to be confused with a phonon). Our next challenge is to start to define its properties, and then to define the physics that may apply to this universe.

Our single sonon is one wavelength. Time is, as-yet, undefined.

There is a lovely visual similarity between how navigators and astronomers have been mapping the heavens for centuries (the Celestial Sphere), and the way scientists model quantum mechanics (the Bloch Sphere).

Whereas a Celestial Sphere helps us map the entirety of the heavens by imagining you as the observer (O) at the center of the universe, a Bloch Sphere is a geometric representation of the complex mathematics of qubits, used in quantum computing. In ‘normal’ computing, a bit is either a one or a zero. A qubit can kind of be both at the same time (see “you guys put complex numbers in your ontologies?”). And if that sounds beautifully confusing, it is.

As I’ve been looking at these ways of viewing the universe at such wildly different scales, and how Bloch Spheres are used to help describe photons, I wanted to attempt to create an equivalent of a Bloch Sphere to define dimensions of influence in our sonon. As I’m also trying to bring in the large-scale cosmological mathematics, it seemed to fit to deal with these confusing extremes in parallel.

We begin with phase in a classical sense.  We then consider amplitude to be defined by the number of sonons counted (as classical physics, we’ve not yet considered quantum state probability amplitudes). In sound, as classically defined in our universe as a pressure wave, there is no polarisation. This makes it hard to create any mapping that might lead to concepts of entanglement, or that captures the strangely observer-centric nature of photons.

Instead we create the notion of temporal musicality. A sonon is and is not musical if it is embodied in an observable frame of reference that is musical (e.g. an observable frame of reference could be a piece performed in a rendered space for a listener). We define ‘musical’ as ‘an emotive response’ over a period of time (performance time). A sonon may be considered musical if it lies on the surface of the Bloch Sphere. Inside the Bloch Sphere we admit that we are not sure if it is.

Whether or not it is, is dependent on its observation—which embodies the entire context and structure in which it is heard, and the listener. It is impossible to recreate a sonon since it is, by definition, only rendered in a temporal space as an auditory event.

We may or may not be able to model context: a combination of sonons in an acoustic environment. We may or may not be able to model the listener: which could range from a microphone to a human, from a bird to a black-hole, and therefore may be unknowable. We may be unable to differentiate between a sonon and a rendered sonon (e.g. if time runs backwards, is it a different sonon?).

We create a parallel of wavefunction collapse as this temporal rendering. A sonon can exist in many states prior to being heard. It is only the act of hearing that renders it as having a musical response (cf. in quantum mechanics it is not possible to know the state of a photon until it is observed). (I leave the idea that consciousness is prerequisite for ‘hearing’ as an exercise for another day. It’s also interesting to think about how you might render Cage’s 4’33” in this context and whether a sonon could be considered musical without any other context.)

Having defined a fundamental particle, we then consider what physics may exist in this soniverse. We first must create time. We are drawn to ideas of ‘causality’: in this context causality is only rendered by the listener. Our soniverse may end up only being rendered temporal through experiencing it. It is multi-directional: conversations can be run backwards as well as forwards.

Our big-bang event is the spontaneous creation of all sonons that can exist. We expand the event horizon of the soniverse exponentially and introduce spontaneous random variations. Our parameters of expansion are time, phase and wavelength. We do not define any physical space (there is no space-time). In our initial model, distance is only measured in sonon wavelengths. Analogous to the relativistic perspective of a photon, its position is ‘everywhere’ and its ‘distance’ is ‘nothing’ in between. It may be that we begin in zero or one dimension.

We define Time to have three independent dimensions: the individual sonon wavelength (=1?), the duration an individual instrument as rendered (the instrument time), and a duration equal to the length of an individual piece (the performance time). An instrument time can be longer than a performance time (for example, the 1000 year piece Longplayer, could be considered transitory: an individual’s snippet of conversation could be considered a shard of the instrument that is every word they ever utter).

In our wave-time, wavelength, phase and Time may vary over time. We define an equivalent of the inverse square law: sonons diminish to the square of their wavelength. We define a temporal gravity whereby harmonics may cluster at intervals proportional to their relative density at temporal wavelengths (ie. repetition of sonons within a localised event horizon may cause clustering—’mass’). This could, for example, be an equivalent to a ‘rhythmic or musical phrase’ in classical music. Sonons attract if there is a temporal ‘harmony’.

We define an Epoch to be the finite age of this soniverse. It may be equal to, or longer than, the performance time.

We define a curvature of wave-time. This curvature is in frequency space (S_μʊ;ג) and is time-variant based on where we are in this epoch.

We can also attempt to visualise the soniverse in our four dimensional physical space-time. We can develop new modes of listening, and new modes of interaction between these two universes.

We can take an individual sonon cluster and redshift it. We can take clusters of our virtual sonons and vary their localised gravity based on where our ‘projected hand of god’ creates motion in a sonon cluster.

We can enquire if there is a concept of ‘aubit’ — the equivalent of a physical orbit. For example, if we can define the notion of ‘clustering’, then we can define clustering in relation to a notion of gravitation that operates in a cosmological context (the wave-time is bent in the soniverse as space-time bend in the universe).

We can create singularities: supermassive, hyper-localised gravity that acts to distort the surrounding wave-time akin to gravitational lensing. A listener may traverse a timeline in any direction.

We can define entropy, and declare it to increase and decrease as the soniverse expands and contracts. Entropy does not really derive from the expansion/contraction of the universe (they are related, but not consequential) but I have always assumed them to be quite deeply linked. I couldn’t explain to you why, but I like the idea of either decay-to-noise, or crystallisation-from-noise, and to me these are linked to the idea of big bang and big crunch in an oscillating universe.

In the beginning there was nothing, and then there was noise.

We have yet to define other particles, such as electrons or quarks, or other atomic structures. If I was an academic, at this point I would say something like ”we leave molecular interactions as an exercise for the reader”, however I’m much more interested in the actions below.

We’ve started modelling this here: http://www.astro.ljmu.ac.uk/~amn/Soniverse/demograph.html

Actions

1. If you have no idea about any of the science, we’d love to hear your feedback about the ideas you took away from reading this. Over time we want to find ways of trying to write about this in an accessible way. Just before Patrick Moore passed away, I was preparing an article for the Sky at Night on some of this. We’d like to explore the language that helps people feel curious to learn, and we need your help to do that.
2. If you have any idea what we might be talking about, we need your help. Andy and Libby are helping me to understand things, and we will continue to explore and make things. And I know some of you are experts in cosmology, quantum mechanics, electronic music and/or in art-science cross-over projects.

In doing so we are creating

• ideas
• mappings (literal, conceptual, theoretical, emotional)
• tools (“Soniverse Engines”)
• sounds (e.g. sonifications represent early sketches / the materials from which soniverse instruments may be constructed)
• instruments
• presentations (papers, public talks, e.g. Royal Astronomical Society)
• compositions and performances

These may use either our actual universe, or other invented cosmologies.

It is based and builds upon and expanded from the Binary Dust series:

• Foundations
• Escape into the Multiverse
• Acoustic Cosmology