AT A GLANCE
Objects of
Interest
artist Lucianne Walkowicz
By Larissa Zimberoff
Contributor
Many don’t give a second thought to planets
outside our own solar system, but since its launch
in 2009, NASA’s Kepler mission has found almost
3,000 planet candidates. These possible planets
are known as Kepler Objects of Interest. In her
paper on potential exoplanet candidates, Princeton astrophysicist Lucianne Walkowicz uses stars
to help in her understanding of these planets. If
a new batch of planets doesn’t excite you, Walkowicz hopes that by translating her scientific data
into soundscape, the layperson will be as excited
by outer space as she is.
Walkowicz the astrophysicist is also an artist.
Her art ranges from oil painting to comics but
she has begun dabbling in sound, which you can
hear if you’re in the Washington D.C. area this
summer. Her newest piece is included in Fermata, an art show that is more audio than visual.
Brothers Ryan and Hays Holladay who are sound
artists in their own right, and Cynthia Connolly,
curated the show at Artisphere, with the tagline
“A Celebration of Sound.” Over 30 artists created
sound-based works for Fermata, which may lead
you to wonder, what did people look at? Along
one wall of the gallery space sound artist John
Henry Blatter mounted 100 vintage speakers in
all shapes and sizes. On the floors in the middle
were amorphous red chairs and reclining lounges.
At the opening reception of the show, a night
that is usually filled with loud voices and drinking, there was a noticeable hush to the crowd as if
there were a sign: Quiet please; we’re listening.
Invited to be a part of the Fermata show,
Walkowicz started with data from NASA’s Kepler
Mission, which fuels her research. The Kepler
Mission was designed to survey our region of the
Milky Way galaxy to determine what fraction
SciArt in America June 2014
Photo courtesy Ryan Holladay.
of the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy
might have planets in or near the habitable zone.
“Stellar Tathata,” the new piece, is a product of
this investigation.
Explaining the origin of her piece, Walkowicz said, “Stars spin on their axes like tops, and
because they have dark and bright patches on
their surfaces, their spin causes them to become
brighter and darker at the frequency they are
spinning at.” The data Walkowicz’s art is based
on is grounded in the fact that the sun, and most
other stars, have these multiple frequencies.
In many ways, data can be likened to the paint
of sciart, so next Walkowicz turned to software.
Working in PyAudio, a sound-generating module
in Python, she decided on audible frequencies by
assigning stars that rotated every ~25 days or so to
a middle C (261.6 Hz) sound. “I don’t use ‘notes’
exactly besides that––it’s a continuous scale of
frequencies rather than a discrete scale of notes,
which is why it sometimes can sound quite dissonant,” she wrote to me over email. For example,
if a star was spinning slowly, it received a lower
pitch, and those spinning fast entered the score
with a higher pitch. Her goal was to enable an immediate experience of the otherwise mind spinning reams of data. Hearing her sounds, Walkowicz hoped that for a brief moment we could see
the world like she sees it––as if we were all just
your average no-big-deal astrophysicist.
Walkowicz’s time at Princeton is coming to a
close and from there she will move to the Adler
Planetarium in Chicago, splitting her time between research and inspiring kids to look up to
the sky. There’s just something about stars in the
sky. Sounds a bit romantic doesn’t it?
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