Drexel prof turns the cosmos into a musical instrument

During the Philly Tech Week hackathon event, Drexel engineering professor Youngmoo Kim hacked some music software so that it turned data about star brightness into audible tones. In other words, he turned the stars into a musical score that could be played.

Kim told the Drexel News Blog:

 "'The program I started with was intended to use the sound of a viola to excite the resonators of the piano," Kim said. "My basic hack was to take luminosity data from the Kepler probe and substitute that in place of the viola to essentially have the sound of the stars play the piano."

Pretty cool. The downside, though, is that stars sound like some minimalist New Agey BS and not like Danzig. [Drexel News Blog, via @raewing]