Listening to data from the Large Hadron Collider | Lily Asquith |TEDxZurich

Sonification is the process of creating sounds that carry information. Musical compositions carry information in the sense that they often describe a place, a time or a feeling; the associations we make between sonic properties such as pitch and physical properties such as speed or size, come to us without effort. The grand aim of the LHCsound project is to 'dorkify' the process of encoding information in sound. The attempts to capture the behaviour of the recently discovered Higgs boson in sounds are presented for your wonder and bafflement.

Lily Asquith is a High Energy Particle Physics research scholar working on the ATLAS experiment at CERN. Lily completed her PhD in 2009 at University College London, on the search for a Higgs boson in association with a pair of top quarks using the ATLAS detector. Since 2010 Lily has been a member of the ATLAS High Energy Physics group at Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, where her work has been focussed on the study of jet physics: the observable sprays of particles governed by Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). She has been actively involved in science communication since her student days, establishing the LHCsound project to facilitate maximum appreciate of the experiments ongoing at the LHC, and writing for the Guardian science blog 'Life and Physics'. Currently Lily is based at CERN in Geneva, where she is co-leading the group of physicists investigating the use of novel techniques to use the substructure of hadronic jets in searches for new physics and in precision measurements of the properties of the newly discovered Higgs boson.

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[everydaychris]

Wow, Lily is absolutely amazing. You absolutely will not find a physicist with a great sense of humor, whilst trying her hand at secondary data...to find the sound of particles. My hat off to you, ma’am. Your audience is a dumpster fire of void personalities, as well.

[relaxingnature]

Some people spend too much time indoors ..thinking themselves into a confused loop

[andrewstang-green]

What happens when you play these sounds back at the particles? Maybe on a much smaller scale, high energy, high frequency, low amplitude. Antigravity?

[charlieangkor]

atom atomos means indivisible. not only they divide it into pieces - protons - but now they smash even these pieces into pieces! they need to update their nomenclature

[FranNoesse]

Sounds like alien first contact.

Maybe slow down time for rare events and speed up for background?

[dazy]

like rain or a day and all its episodes, , we reach out to understand the impossible simply because of the smog created by the machine in front of us, wow you guys are bright

[thezoms]

LHC’s sonic @ 7:54
1 like 1 replay
7:54

[jt]

Who says we wants tax going on your 'CERN' project? Such weird goings on with that thing

[lily.asquith]

This is the LHCsound project, with sonifications by the composer Carla Scaletti.

[rohanphadtare]

Why click a 3d photo in this 8d world?

[rahtheth]

this video was the key to me finalizing my thesis for a 300 musical writing class! amazing work

[Awarewoolf]

Around the 12 minute mark sounds like DMT

[darthkahn]

I always imagined the anti-shears would be blonde.
The universe still has much to teach us.

[seagullys]

What a coincidence that I found this video. I was actually thinking about how to make sound from LHC data yesterday. My idea was actually incredibly similar to hers.

[jerrygundecker]

Where is the Disney super collider being built? I want to ride at near light speed. And the collide with snow white.

[Stabilized]

Enjoyed her reasoning behind the point of the project. Interesting that this question is addressed as we don't really ask this question with a lot of another art. Maybe if you had created something that sounded like a Beethoven symphony people wouldn't ask, but who really knows?

[DaniCali]

Lily Asquith Roks .. "The Higgs is alive with the Sound of Music...:)"

[thezoms]

Conjoin all mappings and make one sonic collab

[owencampbell]

I think they've gone too far, someday some brains will just blow up...amazing..

[sarlaccstapeworm]

Soooo... I just WASTED like 17 minutes of my life that I'll never get back? Is THAT what you're telling me??