Particle physicist and musician Piotr Traczyk has taken data plots from the historic discovery of the Higgs boson and converted it into music that can be played by two guitars. Heavy metal guitars, to be more precise. The result is as nerdy as it is excellent.
To convert the discovery of the Higgs boson into music, Traczyk mapped points in histograms to a chromatic scale, and then used logarithms to squeeze the frequency range into something suitable for a guitar. The resulting "song" is performed by two guitars, where one plays the gamma-gamma run and the other the 4-lepton riff. You can geek out over more details at the Cylindrical Onion blog.
Above: The 4-lepton plot.
Above: The gamma-gamma mass plot
"Each guitar also plays something else when the other guitar plays the sonification; I took the liberty of writing these parts to make the whole thing blend seamlessly," writes Traczyk. "I added a drum and bass part – it is a metal tune after all! The only thing that remained to be done was to film the video and CERN’s main auditorium was the obvious choice of location: this is where the original discovery was announced."
Looking ahead, Traczyk is hoping for new data — and a new song — now that the juiced-up LCH is back in business .
Images: Traczyk/Cylindrical Onion