Particle Wind Chime

Instead of seeing visualizations of subatomic particle collisions, what if you could hear them? Matt Bellis, a Stanford particle physicist, teamed up with a focused group of hackers and experimented with mapping particle collision data with a variety of sounds.

Particle Wind Chime was a Hack that took subatomic particle collision data and mapped it to sounds. Matt Bellis, a Stanford particle physicist, teamed up with a focused group of hackers and experimented with mapping particle collision data with a variety of sounds. The result was an amusingly awkward symphony of science that you could control via a web interface. 

The novelty is that typically you see visualizations of subatomic particle collisions, like from CERN, but this group wanted to be able to tell the differences between different collisions through the use of sound so you could hear how different particles decay, or how they interact with one another. By using sound than using visuals, the team explored you might be able to get new understanding or more information, since our ears often have more fidelity than our eyes. 

It is a great instance of a scientist learning how he can make his work more accessible by working with people from outside his domain. For the rest of the team who didn't have science backgrounds, they learning a lot more about particle physics. This was a team that left Science Hack Day being well-educated all around.

Augmented diagnostic tool

"Our hope is for the Particle Windhcime to be used as a type of “augmented” diagnostic tool for physicists working at accelerator laboratories around the world."

Another interesting thing about this ‘hack’ is how it was explored afterwards as a an augmented diagnostic tool for accelerator laboratories to use for detecting problems in the accelerator.  They looked into the possibility of using it at an accelerator laboratory so that people could get used to how the accelerator sounds, in addition to the screens, to telling them about how the accelerator was doing. Subsequent hacks at Science Hack Days have also gone on to inspire particle physics in unexpected ways. One team created a beard-detecting hack using a USB microscope paired with a computer vision library that measured small lines – as a result of being exposed to this fun hack, Bellis has written a proposal for how to detect cosmic rays in a cloud chamber using similar techniques.

Further Reading

1. Particle Physics Windchime Homepage 
2. http://www.mattbellis.com/windchime/
3. OpenSourced code on GitHub - https://github.com/derek/particle-windchime