Song of the Muons is a project I developed with CMS physicist Wolfgang Adam through the ‘art@CMS’ collaboration at CERN, between 2014 and 2016.
The installation sonically spatializes high-energy collisions between subatomic particles in the Large Hadron Collider, recorded by the Compact Muon Solenoid. The detector data is tuned into a format that is manifested acoustically, and presented as an 8-channel sound installation. By using precise mathematical processes known as “relativistic Lorentz transforms” the near-light-speed events are slowed down to amplify and enhance the expressive qualities present within specific particle collisions, in a way that maintains a consistency with the initial physical events, so that ultimately nature is the source of the composition.
‘Song of the Muons’ premiered at the 2016 SUSY conference on supersymmetry in particle physics, as part of the ‘Symmetries’ art@CMS exhibition, 4 July 2016, at the University of Melbourne Sidney Myer Asia Centre, and has since been exhibited at the Palais de la Musique, Strasbourg, 2016, and the Sophia Science festival, Bulgaria, 2017. The composition is 10 minutes in three sections : hadronic excitations; muon events; and supersymmetric speculations.
Thanks to Wolfgang Adam and Michael Hoch @ CMS, Raymond Volkas @ Unimelb, Matthew Gingold for the speakers, and Lindon Davey-Milne for the towers.
