ATLAS data sonification: a new interface for musical expression and public interaction

The goal of this project is to transform ATLAS data into sound and explore how ATLAS audio can be a source of inspiration and education for musicians and for the general public. Real-time ATLAS data is sonified and streamed as music on a dedicated website. Listeners may be motivated to learn more about the ATLAS experiment and composers have the opportunity to explore the physics in the collision data through a new medium. The ATLAS collaboration has shared its expertise and access to the live data stream from which the live event displays are generated. This talk tells the story of a long journey from the hallways of CERN where the project collaboration began to the halls of the Montreux Jazz Festival where harmonies were performed. The mapping of the data to sound will be outlined and interactions with musicians and contributions to conferences dedicated to human-computer interaction will also be discussed.