‘Chirps’ in space: new album captures the sound of black holes colliding

If two black holes collide in the vacuum of space, do they make a sound?

Sound waves can’t travel in the almost perfect vacuum of space – no one can hear you scream, as the tagline from Alien goes. But electromagnetic and gravitational waves can, and a new album has turned these signals from space into musical tracks.

The album, Celestial Incantations, incorporates cosmic “sounds” from within and beyond our solar system, such as the oscillations of a comet, radiation from a galactic pulsar and the merger of two black holes.

The album is a collaboration between Kim Cunio, an associate professor and convenor of musicology at the Australian National University, UK artist Diana Scarborough and Dr Nigel Meredith from the British Antarctic Survey.

Cunio said the trio selected the sounds together which he used alongside acoustic instruments to compose each track.

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“We’ve had things like theramins and ondes martenot that have made the science-fictiony sound for nearly 100 years now,” he said. “[I thought] wouldn’t it be great if we could acoustically accompany something that is naturally occurring, rather than making it synthetic?”

The first few tracks begin on Earth and include the sound of compressed air bubbles escaping from a Stone Age ice core collected from Antarctica, and the pops and pings generated by lightning activity.

The track Cataclysm incorporates a “chirp” of gravitational waves – ripples in spacetime – emitted by the merger of two black holes, which took place 1.3 billion light years away and was detected for the first time in 2016.

“This is so much grander than even what I can conceive as a person,” said Cunio.

“We can’t actually even see what has created the ripple, we can only just feel the ripple. It’s almost impossible to come to terms with, and I thought it needed something that is more than I or any other pianist I know could actually play.”

Cunio set up a virtual piano with a switch to trigger a note doubler, causing each note to be played twice as the piece progresses.

Other tracks incorporate sounds from space exploration, such as Nasa’s Voyager 1 space probe leaving our solar system, and the first acoustic recording of the atmosphere of Mars, recorded at the Jezero crater in February.

“There’s a role for art to really support science and to show what science can achieve for all of us – all the things we take for granted,” said Cunio. “Art can make the meaning of this incredible legwork that scientists do.”

Celestial Incantations is free to stream and download.