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Tech Nov 18, 2020
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‘Out-of-this-world’ ringtones — made through a musical interpretation of the weather patterns on the planet Mars — have been released by NASA . Researchers used the Pleiades supercomputer at the space agency’s Ames Research Center in California to turn predicted Martian cloud movements into sound.
Once this ‘data sonification’ process was complete, flautist and musicologist Alyssa Schwartz of the Fairmont State University in West Virginia brought the piece to life. From her rendition, snippets were sampled to produce ringtones, which can be downloaded from the NASA website . ‘With the growing interest in Mars exploration, there is a pressing need to study and predict the planet’s weather, and that is what the incredible Pleiades supercomputer is able to do,’ said physicist Domenico Vicinanza of the Anglia Ruskin University.
‘We’ve used real scientific data to create real music, so that Alyssa is, in effect, playing the shape of Mars clouds in motion, as predicted by the supercomputer.’ Pleiades — one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world — is used by NASA to forecast the weather on Mars. Mars has the largest dust storms in the entire solar system, which can last for several months and cover the entire […]
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