This piece of music uses the *actual* sounds of the sun

17 October 2017, 17:30 | Updated: 17 October 2017, 17:32

Amelia Chain’s piece ‘Solstice’ uses real sound recordings of our sun, provided by NASA. And unsurprisingly it sounds awesome

Amelia Chain was inspired to create her piano piece ‘Solstice’ after a conversation with her daughter:

“My daughter Katie is studying Physics at Imperial College and we had this conversation a couple of years ago when she went on a five-week course to study how stars age in the Messier 35 cluster.

“We learned that we could, via Nasa Goddard, look at all these fantastic images and we could hear the sun’s vibrations and it was such a source of inspiration. I just wanted to develop the track around it. We set it to a particular key and it just inspired me to go on from there.”

Solstice opens with the sound of the sun’s vibrations sped up 40,000 times – so it’s within the range of human hearing. Then a piano melody over a string accompaniment. And it closes with the sound of the sun’s vibrations.

“We get very excited about science,” said Amelia, “so it was a pleasure to create this track about something that we, as a family, just love.” 

You can find out more about Amelia on her website, YouTube channel and listen to more of her music here.