CD Music from Light by Hierospháneia

CD Music from Light by Hierospháneia

The album "Music From Light", by Hierospháneia, a cross-disciplinary project that fuses art and science.

"Music From Light" is the first album by Hierospháneia. Hierospháneia are Xavier de Palau and Rafael Balaguer, who have been collaborating in multiple multidisciplinary projects since 2011. Both with an extensive background in their respective fields, Xavier de Palau is a musician and computer scientist and Rafael Balaguer is an astronomer and science popularizer.

It is a collection of 33 themes included in this CD that facilitate an immersive sound journey through the Universe. It is a peculiar album: astronomical methods have been used to obtain the musical compositions, the main author of the themes are the stars!

This is a project that began in 2015 and has been built from scratch, from the capture of the light of the stars, their sonification, and to the design of the final product in physical format.

The CD has been released on 22-02-2022 and is on sale in very few points, one of them in Telescopiomania. The CD includes a very complete booklet and a star map with the list of themes and the respective location of the stars in the sky at the time their light was captured.

It should be noted that these are musical themes obtained directly from stars, planets... In other words, it is not music inspired by the stars, it is music extracted directly from the light of the stars! Moreover, there is very little human intervention in the process of sonification of the light, precisely to maintain the maximum fidelity to the sky. That's why some themes sound perhaps suggestive, enigmatic and relaxing... but others can sound disturbing..

The booklet and the whole cd is in English, this first album has been given an international vocation, but in Telescopiomania we have the document in Spanish and Catalan.

EXTRACTING MUSIC FROM LIGHT, THE TRUE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES.

Since its beginnings, spectroscopy has been an exciting technique. Newton, in 1672 with his first research on prisms and the decomposition of sunlight, already showed that the white light of our star was composed of a mixture of all the colors of the rainbow. And later, Fraunhofer's advances in 1815 by developing more precise spectroscopes already revealed the true chemical identity of the Sun and, eventually, that of virtually any object from which we can capture its light. Thus, indirectly, spectroscopy allows us to characterize the chemical composition of a star with great precision. Spectroscopy has since been a formidable tool for understanding the universe.

"Music From Light" brings a new vision to spectroscopy, presenting new methods for integrating spectroscopy with art. We have learned to turn light into music. Now we can compose the authentic music of the spheres thanks to a simple spectroscope, a diffraction grating with which we can decompose the light of any star captured in our observatory, thus obtaining the chemical identity, personal and non-transferable, of each member of the cosmic family. We present the authors' (Rafael Balaguer) own version of the sound of the light coming from the bodies of the solar system, including the Earth, and from far beyond... How does the sky sound? Joining science with art, these compositions are not based on music inspired by the stars, but on music extracted directly from stars, planets, comets, eclipses..

HUNTING SPECTRA

For anyone with a scientific vocation (science is an attitude towards life), astronomy today is a special motivation. Changing theoretical reading for real action is always an exciting opportunity that we should not miss, and thanks to spectroscopy we can take action and turn our observations into real science.

This project starts in 2015 and the truth is that, as such, it will never have a definitive end, since spectra and music can be obtained from any star at any time, as when for example new bright comets visit us. The main objective of the work is to chemically characterize the observed stars and transform this information into an audible experience.

On a personal level, the thrill of seeing the famous "Fraunhofer bands" directly with your own eyes is absolutely unforgettable. It is that thrill that drives us to share this experience in a cross-disciplinary project, merging art and science.

SONIFYING THE COSMOS.
The art of sonification is the act of converting any idea or physical object that can be represented numerically into sound. For example, the pixels of a digitized image, the measurements of an electrocardiogram, the statistical data of a sample, the temperatures of climate change over the years, the demographic values of a population, real-time Internet searches, would be just some of the many possibilities to choose from. Thus, "Music From Light" is the result of transforming spectroscopy data obtained from different celestial bodies into sound.

In recent years, in an effort to reunify science with other disciplines of a more social nature, it is common for official agencies to publish results with the sound of the stars. The sound captured by professional observatories is even available to artists to compose their songs. Our case is different. We have autonomously carried out the whole process of capturing, processing and analyzing the spectrum, elaborating new and more precise computer algorithms that allow, for the first time, a more precise and extensive transformation from an energetic manifestation of visible wavelength to an audible wavelength.

The result is a music truly extracted from light, with very little human intervention, which is perhaps disturbing, but evocative and suggestive at the same time. It is the authentic music of the spheres, the fruit of a new transversal vision that floods art with science.

We are pleased to present to you a journey to another reality of the cosmos -perhaps we only intuit it- through the sense of hearing, built on the foundations of the science of spectroscopy and astronomy, as well as the use of modern technological tools: telescopes, computers and synthesizers.

CD Music from Light by Hierospháneia