Music on Mars

and other updates from the area where science and culture overlap

Is it even worth going anywhere if the music isn’t good? If that’s your philosophy, you’d hate Mars. 🚀🎶

According to a recent study, sounds on Mars travel very differently than on Earth and in practice that means that music on the Red Planet sounds like you’re hearing it through the headphones of the person sitting next to you on the bus.

Speculative illustration of an astronaut on Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

In an interview with Classic FM, Nina Lanza of the Los Alamos National Laboratory says that “if you are listening to music that is very high pitched, it will sound [very] tinny and quiet... whereas the lower pitches are going to sound a little more robust.”

You can hear the difference between Earth and Mars for yourself using an emulator on the NASA website. High tones such as bird song or a reversing truck become almost inaudible.

🎙️ There is even a tool where you can record your own voice and hear how it sounds on Mars. Here, I recorded a little message for you:

( To view the transcript, click the player above to access the track on Soundcloud. And for reference, this is how I sound on Earth)

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💡 Interesting links

• 🐊 Vanity Fair’s Delia Cai took science writer Ed Yong to the zoo and the result is a very fun interview peppered with random animal facts.  

• 🧬 Both Sachin Rawat at Big Think and Sofia Quaglia at Smithsonian Magazine recently wrote about scientists who turn molecules into sound. Rawat focused on a preprint about music from organic molecules which could make it easier for software to process molecular structure.  Quaglia featured several biochemists who turn DNA and proteins into music. 

• 🎭 Jacquinn Sinclair reviews science journalist’s Alanna Mitchell’s stage show “Sea Sick”

• 🎵 Rapper Ruby Ibarra used to be a scientist until her music career took off. “A lot of the skills I’ve learned in the sciences also inform how and why I create music,” she tells Daphne Chouliaraki Milner in an interview for Atmos.

• 🎬 Bob Goldstein designs “gig posters” for science talks and they’ve recently been featured in the new film Emergency.

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