We had Dr. Paul Francis give a talk last night at the MAS monthly meeting. Paul is currently the scientist in charge of the Australian effort put into the Gemini 8m north and south telescopes in Hawaii and Chile. A truly fascinating bloke.
Anyway - he has been experimenting with the way that humans percieve information coming from space in the form of the visible light. He surmised that although human vision provides good spatial reference to the brain so that we can determine where we are relative to other objects, vision rates poorly as far as being able to intimate subtleties in recurring patterns. Ranging from ~400 to 800THz, or the highest frequency being only double the base, visible light cannot impart subtleties as well as the audible range - i.e. from 20 to 20KHz, or 100 times the base frequency. There is just so much more room to move in.
What he has done, and so far for fun, is to sample the visible spectra eminating from a variety of sources such as nebulae, galaxies and stars of varying ages and then translate the sample to a more widely spread audible tone - downsampling by a factor of millions and even trillions along the way to make it all audible to humans.
It's pretty cool stuff, and his web page
http://www.mso.anu.edu.au/~pfrancis/ goes into greater detail and actally has a bunch of example mp3 tracks to listen to. It goes to prove that we tend to relate more to sound to get a "feeling" from than light. I'd love to see a grid set up across a nebula, with each intersect being sampled. Then, all could be projected onto a sound stage of sorts so that you could walk amongst the variable tones while you looked up at a projection shone down on to an overhead horizontal screen.
Anyway - I found it kind of cool.....
Cheers
Chris
