The sun – does it have a sound? Apparently so.

Data sonification specialist Robert Alexander has utilised his ability to convert data into sounds and created a soundtrack to the sun. Alexander thinks of himself as an explorer, living in the space between art, science and technology. Having already played around with creating sounds for stock price variations, wind speeds, and human pulse rates, what better data-laden object to sonify next than the sun?

Being a fellow at NASA, Alexander’s got hook-ups. The project relied heavily on the data gathered by the Solar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), which is a joint NASA-ESA spacecraft that astronomers use to study the sun. This little spacecraft helps to predict solar flares and eruptions, and Alexander manipulated that data to create songs that are aligned with the physical world, and as Motherboard’s Michael Byrne puts it, “He’s rendered solar flares as human choir, and turned the sun’s rotation into a tribal beat.”

We often think that exploration of the universe is something to be done in a visual sense, however Alexander pushes these expectations with his exploration of the suns data and the sounds it creates,

“We forget that the most powerful tool that we have for exploring the universe is right between our two ears.”

Watch the video above, where you can listen to and learn about the entire process and philosophy behind Robert Alexander’s examination of the sun as an instrument.