Archive by category | Acoustics

The Hubble ‘space opera’

Hubble image of the Orion Nebula, at 1,500 light-years away, the nearest star-forming region to Earth. The bright glow at upper left is from M43, a small region being shaped by a massive, young star's ultraviolet light.

In 2012, composer Paola Prestini began collaborating with astrophysicist Mario Livio — who worked at the Hubble Space Telescope’s operations centre from 1991 to 2015 — on a “space opera” celebrating the intrument’s 25th anniversary. The result, The Hubble Cantata, debuted on the telescope’s 26th. Performed on 6 August at the BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! festival in New York City’s Prospect Park, it is a multidimensional paean to the ‘eye in the sky’, meshing Livio’s narration with performances by Norwegian orchestra 1B1, a 100-strong chorus and Metropolitan opera stars Jessica Rivera and Nathan Gunn, and a climax featuring a 3D virtual-reality (VR) experience incorporating Hubble images that allows viewers to drift through the Orion Nebula. Here Prestini talks about the joys and challenges of putting together a highly collaborative meld of science and art.  Read more

Speaking volumes

Speaking volumes

A couple of months into my first reporting job, I wrote the story “Neanderthal speaks out after 30,000 years”. A research team had synthesized the voice of a Neanderthal by inferring the dimensions of the larynxes of three individuals. All they managed was a single vowel – a gruff ‘ee’ – but they used it to claim that Neanderthals could not utter a kind of vowel sound that is common to all human languages.  Read more

Audiofile: Music and the making of science

Audiofile: Music and the making of science

Is music simply a pleasant accompaniment to thought, or a driving force behind it? The third episode of Nature’s new podcast series on science and sound, Audiofile, examines music’s influence on the development of modern science and the foundations of acoustics (as did our essay series). It also suggests a tantalizing link between Galileo’s scientific mindset and his upbringing: his father, Vincenzo, was a lute maker who conducted what some suggest are the first experiments in acoustics. Father might have inspired in son the idea of measuring a physical system and producing a hypothesis from it.  Read more