Sonifications of Webb's Image of the Cosmic Cliffs in the Carina Nebula

There’s an immersive way to explore some of the first full-color infrared images and data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope – through sound. Listeners can enter the complex soundscape of a near-infrared image of the Cosmic Cliffs in the Carina Nebula, a large cloud of gas and dust where stars are forming or have already formed.

The sonifications scan the image from left to right. The new sounds were also adapted to a video, allowing sighted viewers to watch as a vertical line moves across the frame.

Several files are available for download:

• The first represents the entire image.
• The second only includes sounds from the top portion of the image.
• The third file only includes sounds from the bottom half of the image.
• The fourth file only plays the notes that represent stars.
• A complete text description of all the files are available in a single PDF.

The soundtracks are vibrant and full, representing the detail in this gigantic, gaseous cavity that has the appearance of a mountain range. The gas and dust in the top half of the image are represented in blue hues and windy, drone-like sounds. The bottom half of the image, represented in ruddy shades of orange and red, has a clearer, more melodic composition.

Brighter light in the image is louder. The vertical position of light also dictates the frequency of sound. For example, bright light near the top of the image sounds loud and high, but bright light near the middle is loud and lower pitched. Dimmer, dust-obscured areas that appear lower in the image are represented by lower frequencies and clearer, undistorted notes.

The separate tracks allow you to more easily pick out the meandering melodic line that represents the nebula’s “mountain range” as it rises and falls in the image, through the center of the frame, from left to right. This jagged line between denser and thinner areas of gas and dust is the arc of the sonification’s melody. All stars are represented by a combination of pitches and processed piano notes, but the brightest stars with longer diffraction spikes also carry crashes and clangs from cymbals.

These sonifications do not represent sounds recorded in space. Two musicians mapped the telescope’s data to sound, carefully composing music to accurately represent details the team would like listeners to focus on.

Download the Sonification Files

The video files are available in the column on the left side of the page linked above.

Explore Webb’s image of the Cosmic Cliffs, including its full text description, in more detail.