The Cosmophone: Toward a Sensuous Insight into Hidden Reality

Art and science are both driven by a quest for truth. Their ways are different: the strength of emotion on the one hand, the confrontation of a concept with experiment on the other. But they may have in common the emotion that can result from direct contact with a hidden unexpected physical phenomenon.

The cosmophone [1] is a tentative step in this direction. The installation magnifies the cosmic radiation of protons that originate within our galaxy and constantly bombard the Earth. When impinging upon the atmosphere, they create showers of secondary particles. The most penetrating of these, called muons, reach sea level. These muons traverse our bodies at high speeds, without leaving any sensorial hint of their passage.

The cosmophone is designed to make the flux and properties of cosmic muons directly perceptible within a three-dimensional space (Fig. 2). This is done by coupling a set of elementary particle detectors to an array of loudspeakers using a real-time data-acquisition and numerical sound-synthesis system. Muon detection uses standard techniques from experimental particle physics. The information received from the detectors instantaneously triggers the emission of sounds whose nature depends on the parameters of the detected particles. For example, the trajectory and speed of a muon are characterized by a sound that moves in space from the muon's entry point into the cosmophone down to its exit point, while shifting in frequency as would occur with a real moving sound source (due to the Doppler effect). Low-rate phenomena, like the radiation of showers of electron/anti-electron pairs from muons, are rendered by special sound effects. They provide an additional source of randomness and variety in a given listening sequence.

Fig. 2.

Claude Vallée, the cosmophone in use. (© Claude Valleé) The cosmophone materializes in sound a hidden aspect of reality: cosmic radiation.

In the cosmophone, the choice of sound as the medium is essential for several reasons. First of all, sound is transmitted as a mechanical vibration. This makes hearing a kind of long-range touch that provides a direct contact with the distant phenomenon. Second, new techniques of numerical sound synthesis allow flexible real-time 3D imaging of particle properties. Such an environmental reconstitution is essential to the emotional impact of the physics phenomenon. Thanks to the moderate ability of the ear to locate sound sources, this is possible with a rather coarse sampling of space using detectors and loudspeakers. Sound synthesis also gives a wide range of choice of sound effects. Such effects could even develop into a musical composition driven by the random fluctuations of cosmic phenomena. Finally, sound imaging can conceal completely the technology that creates it, favoring a focus on the physics phenomenon itself. An ideal cosmophone would make every entering visitor suddenly sensitive to a new face of the universe (cosmic radiation) as if by magic.

The principles that guided the design of the cosmophone could be applied to many other physical phenomena. I believe that there exists a whole domain to develop in order to extract beauty and emotion from the hidden complexity of nature.