Skip to main content

Ambient music made with eclipse data is out of this world

eclipse musical composition moon
NASA/SDO
Yesterday’s Great American Eclipse — which swept across the continental United States from Oregon to South Carolina — was the most watched and most photographed eclipse in history, reports the Associated Press. It was truly a sight to behold.

But researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology devised a way to experience the event not with sight, but with sound, using eclipse data to create an ambient musical composition that depicted the event for people with visual impairment.

Recommended Videos

Although the eclipse has ended, you can still hear part of the composition here.

“My lab has been turning information into sound for a couple decades, so this is a natural project for us,” Bruce Walker, director of the Georgia Tech Sonification Lab, told Digital Trends. “We often work on projects that help blind individuals get a better sense of what is happening around them.”

Walker and his team, including then-graduate-student Avrosh Kumar, who Walker credited with the creative effort, received a call from AT&T asking them to develop a sort of soundtrack for the eclipse in support of Aira, a device that helps translate the physical world into sound.

The researchers used timing and duration predictions from astronomers to compose a base soundtrack prior to the event. They also reeled through videos of eclipses to get an impression of how witnessing one felt.

“We learned about the changing light levels, the changing temperatures, and associated events like the ‘false dusk’ and ‘false dawn,’” Walker said, referring to the moments during the eclipse when light resembles dusk and dawn, and tricks animals into responding accordingly. For example, birds begin singing and crickets begin chirping.

“In the piece, I wanted to capture the physical process of an eclipse, portray the immensity of it, and the awe of experiencing an eclipse,” Kumar said. “The first section of the piece that starts about 30 minutes before the maximum eclipse is a slowly developing rhythmic movement capturing time. Its tempo increases so slowly that it is almost unnoticeable but every time you pay attention … you feel the change in the environment. While working on this part, I was thinking of the uneventful slow approach of the moon over the sun.”

The musical energy increases about 15 minutes before totality, as the moon’s path over the sun becomes more drastic.

“After this transition you hear a duel between the sun and the moon,” Kumar said, “the harsh sounding sun and the mellow sounding moon.” These two elements compete until totality when all that’s left of the sun is its corona, peeking over the edges of the moon. “Then the sun re-emerges into another hopeful post-eclipsical phase and fades into the day.”

Live musical alterations were added during yesterday’s event to depict changes in brightness and barometric pressure resulting in a truly visceral listening experience.

Dyllan Furness
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Dyllan Furness is a freelance writer from Florida. He covers strange science and emerging tech for Digital Trends, focusing…
BYD’s cheap EVs might remain out of Canada too
BYD Han

With Chinese-made electric vehicles facing stiff tariffs in both Europe and America, a stirring question for EV drivers has started to arise: Can the race to make EVs more affordable continue if the world leader is kept out of the race?

China’s BYD, recognized as a global leader in terms of affordability, had to backtrack on plans to reach the U.S. market after the Biden administration in May imposed 100% tariffs on EVs made in China.

Read more
Tesla posts exaggerate self-driving capacity, safety regulators say
Beta of Tesla's FSD in a car.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is concerned that Tesla’s use of social media and its website makes false promises about the automaker’s full-self driving (FSD) software.
The warning dates back from May, but was made public in an email to Tesla released on November 8.
The NHTSA opened an investigation in October into 2.4 million Tesla vehicles equipped with the FSD software, following three reported collisions and a fatal crash. The investigation centers on FSD’s ability to perform in “relatively common” reduced visibility conditions, such as sun glare, fog, and airborne dust.
In these instances, it appears that “the driver may not be aware that he or she is responsible” to make appropriate operational selections, or “fully understand” the nuances of the system, NHTSA said.
Meanwhile, “Tesla’s X (Twitter) account has reposted or endorsed postings that exhibit disengaged driver behavior,” Gregory Magno, the NHTSA’s vehicle defects chief investigator, wrote to Tesla in an email.
The postings, which included reposted YouTube videos, may encourage viewers to see FSD-supervised as a “Robotaxi” instead of a partially automated, driver-assist system that requires “persistent attention and intermittent intervention by the driver,” Magno said.
In one of a number of Tesla posts on X, the social media platform owned by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, a driver was seen using FSD to reach a hospital while undergoing a heart attack. In another post, a driver said he had used FSD for a 50-minute ride home. Meanwhile, third-party comments on the posts promoted the advantages of using FSD while under the influence of alcohol or when tired, NHTSA said.
Tesla’s official website also promotes conflicting messaging on the capabilities of the FSD software, the regulator said.
NHTSA has requested that Tesla revisit its communications to ensure its messaging remains consistent with FSD’s approved instructions, namely that the software provides only a driver assist/support system requiring drivers to remain vigilant and maintain constant readiness to intervene in driving.
Tesla last month unveiled the Cybercab, an autonomous-driving EV with no steering wheel or pedals. The vehicle has been promoted as a robotaxi, a self-driving vehicle operated as part of a ride-paying service, such as the one already offered by Alphabet-owned Waymo.
But Tesla’s self-driving technology has remained under the scrutiny of regulators. FSD relies on multiple onboard cameras to feed machine-learning models that, in turn, help the car make decisions based on what it sees.
Meanwhile, Waymo’s technology relies on premapped roads, sensors, cameras, radar, and lidar (a laser-light radar), which might be very costly, but has met the approval of safety regulators.

Read more
Waymo, Nexar present AI-based study to protect ‘vulnerable’ road users
waymo data vulnerable road users ml still  1 ea18c3

Robotaxi operator Waymo says its partnership with Nexar, a machine-learning tech firm dedicated to improving road safety, has yielded the largest dataset of its kind in the U.S., which will help inform the driving of its own automated vehicles.

As part of its latest research with Nexar, Waymo has reconstructed hundreds of crashes involving what it calls ‘vulnerable road users’ (VRUs), such as pedestrians walking through crosswalks, biyclists in city streets, or high-speed motorcycle riders on highways.

Read more