Robert Alexander doesn't just look at the stars — he listens to them. Using the process of sonification, Alexander filters raw audio data from disruptions like solar flares to turn them into something that almost resembles music. His piece, "Solar Heartbeat", may sound like a groaning amp ready to lurch into song, but it's also an accurate representation of the Sun's rotation and an interesting data visualization that can be studied. Alexander also takes inspiration from these visualizations, composing his own pieces based on the filtered data with the hopes of helping us better understand solar events. His methods may not be as familiar to us as those of someone such as Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, but the results are certainly more digestible for the layman.
Turning solar flares into music, for science
is The Verge’s executive editor. He has covered tech, policy, and online creators for over a decade.
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