Cosmic Latte EP

Creators:

Ash Busse (Terafarad) – Music Composition/Production
Louis Kissinger – Scientific Advisor / Writer
Lark Moreno – Digital Artwork

Cosmic Latte EP is a collection of electronic music tracks produced by physics students and inspired by physical concepts from astronomy, radiation, and mechanics.  Most songs serve as a musical analogue to a physical process, modulating aspects of the sounds in order to represent or recreate these processes musically.  The last three songs also include narration or rapping inspired by qualitative study of the relevant physics.  The live performance will include Terafarad playing keyboard along to the songs, as well as rapping!

Listen to the whole album here!!

Tracklist:

Event Horizon

Event Horizon is a song about falling into a black hole. A black hole is a spherical surface that can only be crossed in one direction. Close to the surface of the black hole, time slows down and matter is split apart by an immense gravitational force. The song begins with a bright collection of synthesizers representing the accretion disk, which is a swirling plasma of mass falling into the black hole’s inescapable gravitational well. The synthesizers slow down and fade out to represent the slowing of time, and an ominous bass tone overtakes the sound mix to remind us of the falling body’s grim fate.

Fermi Sea

This piece was created specifically for Quantum Voyages, which I (Ash) acted as the sound operator for.  The scene in question is when the characters brave the vast and scary Fermi Sea and nearly drown in fermions.  It is a very tense and suspenseful scene, so I composed a creepy, dissonant, but ethereal backdrop to the actors shouting in terror!  It also gives the feeling of strong winds pushing everything around by making use of wind samples and white noise.

Rankine Cycle

The Rankine Cycle is the process of heating, cooling, and expansion that converts heat into mechanical energy in an engine. This in an idealized model that can be used to predict and evaluate engine performance. The cycle is broken into four steps, itemized below:

  1. The engine’s working fluid is pumped to a high pressure. A small amount of work is put into the fluid at this stage.
  2. The working fluid is heated at constant pressure until it boils into a totally dry vapor. This is the heat addition stage.
  3. The dry vapor expands through a turbine, generating power.
  4. The working fluid is sent through a condenser, rejecting its remaining heat that cannot be converted into energy.

This song models the Rankine cycle with sounds. The pitch of the song is matched with the fluid’s temperature, the tempo with the pressure, and the entropy with the number of elements in the beat. Entropy is a mathematical abstraction that describes the disorder of a system. It is related to the number of particles, their energy, and the size of the volume that contains them. The song also samples audio from a lecture on the Rankine Cycle.

Cosmic Latte

This song is inspired by a 2001 study by Johns Hopkins researchers to determine the average color of the universe, which they named cosmic latte. The researchers examined telescopic data from over 200,000 galaxies and determined that, on average, the light had a beige-white color with hex triplet #FFF8E7.   It includes some spoken word sections with some thoughts and questions about universal averages and humanity’s place in the universe.  Overall this song is an upbeat and dynamic piece designed to capture your imagination and pay tribute to humanity’s endless curiosity and creativity.

Decay

Radioactive decay is the process by which an unstable nucleus transforms into a more stable form by ejecting a small particle that carries a substantial amount of energy, stabilizing the nucleus. This process is completely probabilistic. Any nucleus has a fixed probability to decay in a unit of time. This probability indicated by its decay constant λ. A single nucleus thus decays exponentially, with a constant half-life. The half-life is defined as the time required for the abundance of a radionuclide to shrink by a factor of 2. Most radionuclides decay into daughter isotopes that are also radioactive, but with a different half-life. Several generations of parent and daughter radionuclides are called a decay chain. The beat of this song is an auditory model of the Thorium decay chain, the process by which, over millions of years, Thorium is converted into seven different long-lived isotopes before reaching stability. Each isotope in the chain is matched to a synth tone or drum sound and its volume increases as that isotope’s population increases. The population of each nuclide (with normalized time constants) in the Thorium chain is plotted against time in figure 1. Midway through the track, MC Thorium hops on the beat to spit some bars about radioactivity.

Figure 1: The abundance of each isotope in the Thorium chain with normalized time constants and abundances over 100-years

Creative Process:

I’ve been producing music for over 5 years and take inspiration from EDM primarily, as well as rock and hip-hop.  As an electronic musician, my favorite part of producing music is the freedom to create and manipulate sound to my liking.  For this project, I took the opportunity to explore and experiment with different techniques that I had never tried before, like tempo changing, sampling YouTube videos, and writing and performing a rap song!  A pervading theme of this album is modulating parameters of the sounds over time in order to recreate physics processes, shown in the intro/outro of Decay as well as the entire track of Rankine Cycle.  Louis was a major contributor in terms of feeding me with ideas and teaching me the scientific concepts behind them and helping connect them to music; both of those two songs originated from his ideas.  Lark was also key in creating the album artwork for Cosmic Latte as well as Decay; we work well together and her visual style really complements my musical style.  I tried to achieve a balance throughout the album between maintaining accuracy and faithfulness to the physics concepts as well as the actual musicality of the songs, and the end product came out as a very dynamic and strange but beautiful sonic journey through the cosmos!