【News】银河听起来像一首时髦的布鲁斯音乐吗?

Does Our Galaxy Sound Like Funky Blues Music? 

新闻来源：VOANews

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Interstellar space is mostly a vacuum, so there is no medium that can carry sound. In other words, space is totally silent. But astronomers have often associated the movement of heavenly bodies with music. With the help of modern technology, one astronomer has turned the signals from the Milky Way into a funky tune.

"It was an idea that I had for a long time," said University of Massachusetts Astronomy Research Professor Mark Heyer, "and only recently has some of the technology come about that somebody like me could access that."

The visible light coming from distant worlds carries a lot of information that can be analyzed with a spectroscope. Heyer developed a computer program, or algorithm, to convert the movement of large clouds of atoms and molecules of different elements and compounds, into music.

Astronomy professor Mark Heyer of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst has developed an algorithm that translated the movements of gases in the Milky Way into music notes. The result was what is known as The Milky Way Blues.

"I take the spectrum and I, essentially, mathematically resample that to a musical scale and that gives that spectrum, which is inherently atonal, it gives it the tonality. And that is what really is the key stuff to make it sound nice," he said.

Heyer randomly assigned different musical instruments to different gases, forming a combination consisting of a saxophone, a piano, an upright bass and some percussion woodblocks. For instance, a certain atomic gas, which fills much of the space between the stars, is represented by the upright bass.

"It gives you that driving pulse, I think, that drives the music forward. And the woodblocks sort of do that as well," he said.

After some experimenting, Heyer decided to use the pentatonic minor blues scale.

"I was experimenting with the algorithm and I had major scales and simple minor scales, but when I first played the available segment of just one of the instruments, it sounded like that could be a very nice blues or jazzy sound to it," he said. "So, I recrafted the algorithm so it could transform the data into a musical blues scale."

Heyer says he was surprised when he realized for the first time that the rotation of our galaxy contains a rhythm — and that funky blues seemed to fit perfectly.

星际间大部分是真空，因此没有能够传递声音的戒指，那么太空就是完全静默的。但是天文学家却常常将天体运动同音乐联系。而从遥远世界发出的可见光携带着能够被分光镜分析的大量信息。马萨诸塞大学的天文学研究教授Mark Heyer 研发了一项计算机程序，能够将由不同元素和混合物组成的大粒子云团的运动转化成音乐。Heyer说他惊讶于第一次意识到星系的自转包含一种节奏，并且流行布鲁斯似乎能与之完美融合。

Q：What kinds of instruments did Heyer use？

Heyer使用了哪些乐器？

上一期的问题：

Q：What is as critical as speed about broadband service？

在宽带业务中，什么是与网速同样重要的？

A：capacity and reliability

性能与可靠程度