Making Beautiful Music from Big Data
Many a marketing guru knows that the motto “If you build it, they will come” doesn’t always apply to technology products. After all, it’s not easy coming up with ways to communicate technical concepts and benefits in a way that doesn’t put the audience to sleep and makes them say “wow.”
Consider the largest astrophysical project in existence, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a radio telescope composed of sixty-six high-precision antennas. ALMA is situated at an altitude of 5000 meters in northern Chile on the Chajnantor Plateau and is operated through an international partnership by countries in Europe, North America, and East Asia in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. ALMA is funded in North America by the U.S. National Science Foundation in cooperation with the National Research Council of Canada.
If a marketing person was writing the creative brief for ALMA, describing what the technology does would include an impressive goal: finding clues to the origin of life. And for how the product works, the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan’s (NAOJ) website notes that ALMA detects faint radio waves emanated by distant celestial objects to study the origin and evolution of galaxies, stars, and planets. As part of its findings, ALMA observed radio waves from a dying star “R Sculptoris.”
The scientists were struggling to explain to the global non-scientific audience why the discoveries of ALMA are critically important. As Wired magazine reports, an astrophysicist at NAOJ contacted PARTY, a creative agency based in New York City and Tokyo, to help convey how cool the work they are doing really is.
How would you depict the massive amounts of data emanating from a dying star? If you thought why not music?—then you too probably belong with Don Draper on “Mad Men.”
The agency created the ALMA MUSIC BOX to put the big data to use by translating seventy different radio images onto musical discs. Here’s the end result: the haunting video “Melody of a Dying Star.”
