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“The entire Sun oscillates in a globally coherent way, and the oscillations are formed by sound waves trapped inside the Sun that make it resonate just like a musical instrument.”

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Chris Farrell

Was so curious to hear these sounds and a little disappointed the article didn't have a way to listen! Had Claude whip up a demo in a few prompts, hewing as closely to the paper's data as possible while pulling from my hobby synthesizer background to make it actually playable, at least as a functional demo.

The oscillations of Sol, turns out, are welllllll below audio rate, but you can multiply the freqs up to a space where it makes sense to our ears and brains pretty easily.

Defaults to x100,000 and there's a 'sonification speed' slider to adjust the multiplier. Below 20 Hz (where human hearing begins) it's in 'low frequency oscillation' (LFO) speed, which in instruments you can use to wiggle/modulate various sound parameters. Kept that simple here - you can use the LFO values to modulate things like pitch, volume, and a filter cutoff.

The 'p-mode drones' are the various pitches the sun produces, per the paper. Those are the notes/scale, effectively, of the sun. And there's a step sequencer that lets you play around with hearing those as a pattern. The LFOs apply to those sounds.

'Solar cycle minimum' selects which of the four quiet periods the frequencies are drawn from - the shifts between them are fractions of a microhertz, reflecting actual structural differences inside the sun between cycles. At x100k those become subtle but real pitch differences.

https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/79487719-bb1c-42c9-b850-aed2dde50363

Jason KottkeMOD

This is so cool! Thanks for posting. Not every day you get to listen to the Sun jiggle.

Chris Farrell

Of course, enjoy and feel free to remix it! I'm so enamored by this concept now. Might take it further and develop into a fully fledged instrument for the Monome Norns... if I do I'll tap ya with a video about it or something. 🙂

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