When Particles Collide

When Particles Collide (2026) is an electronic suite of five sonifications based on high-energy particle physics collision data. This composition is data driven in the sense that electronic music is encoded in software as algorithmic processes which generate the music from the data in real time. The data utilized in this work is from CERN's ATLAS detector, a particle detector at the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research which is located on the border of France and Switzerland near Geneva, Switzerland.

Inspired by the work of CERN physicist Lily Asquith, whose fascinating sonifications of Higgs data were made available to the world via the website The Sounds of Science (CERN 2010; Asquith 2013) prior to the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, I wanted to learn how to sonify particle collision data. With the assistance of colleagues from the University of South Carolina's High Energy Physics Group, I was able to figure out how to do it. I decided to create five sonification studies using Cycling 74's Max/MSP. Each study was composed on a different high-energy particle physics theme using a traditional approach to digital synthesis. Working in the realm of digital synthesis allowed me to compose sound at the micro level (Roads 2001) for the first time.

The first study, Cloud Chamber, is a brief two-voice canon that uses an additive synthesis approach to create the impression of a two particles quickly circling around one another in a white hot gas. The second movement, Quantum noise, uses a subtractive synthesis to sculpt music from white noise. In the third study, String Theory, I used the Karplus-Strong physical model to create a virtual string to perform on which could be nearly any imaginable size. In the fourth study, Time Warp, I used granular synthesis to deconstruct an audio sample of a ticking clock into microscopic sound grains which are then projected at various pitch and time scales to suggest the warping of time. The fifth and final study, Radiant Energy, is another brief movement that uses Frequency modulation to give the impression of pure enery.

Credit: Lucas Taylor (CERN-EX-9710002)
License: © 1997-2026 CERN (License: CC-BY-SA-4.0)

Acknowledgements

This project was funded by a University of South Carolina Provost's Creative and Performing Arts Grant titled Music, Physics and Sonification. The data used in this work is from CERN's ATLAS Experiment (ATLAS 2008), which is now available under a Creative Commons CC0 license at the CERN Open Data portal. Special thanks to physicists Milind Purohit and Reginald Alexander Bain of the University of South Carolina's High Energy Physics Group for their assistance with this project.

Updated: January 4, 2026