Messier I

by Maze Pelham

My piece is an EDM (electronic dance music) song inspired by Messier 1, more commonly known as the Crab Nebula.

My goal was to create a sonic experience where it feels like the listener is directly experiencing the beauty of the Crab Nebula, by directly using data from the nebula in my song. At first, I tried to find sonifications from Crab Nebula light curves, but there were none, because there's so much dust around it that it makes for noisy and uninteresting data to turn into sound. After spending time deliberating on how to circumvent this issue, I got an idea. While I didn't expect to do this for a song, I made a python script using the Astronify package in order to turn telescope images of the Crab Nebula into sound. I then used techniques like granular synthesis, vocoding, and resampling to transform those sonifications into something harmonic, and musically enjoyable.

I also wanted to make more general musical choices that reflect the nature and life of the Crab Nebula as well. For example, the beginning features a sound I synthesized that pulsates at a rate of around 30 times per second, because there is a pulsar at the center of the Crab Nebula, that "pulses" at around that rate. I also wanted to reflect the fact that this pulsar will slow down as it cools down and the gas around it saps its energy by slowing down the tempo over time.