Jazz with the cosmos | CERN at the Montreux Jazz Festival | 12 July

CERN will be participating in the Montreux Jazz Festival again this year with "The Physics of Music and the Music of Physics" at the Petit Palais on 12 July. The event, which is also part of CERN's 60th anniversary schedule, brings the music of the LHC, the Higgs boson, and the distant cosmos.

The Physics of Music and the Music of Physics
Petit Palais, Montreux Jazz Festival
Saturday 12 July 2014 - 5.00 p.m. 
Free Entrance - for more information, visit the event site

You may not realise it but energetic cosmic rays are passing through your body every second. They are produced by the collision of high-energy charged particles with the Earth’s upper atmosphere. The particles come from events occurring all over our Universe, some of which happened billions of years ago.

A little over 100 years ago, scientists started detecting these ‘cosmic rays’, finding that there were many more particles in our Universe than we originally thought. Arturo Fernandez Tellez, a Mexican particle physicist on the ALICE Experiment at CERN has constructed the Cosmic Piano -- a musical instrument from components of a detector designed to measure cosmic rays. His colleague, Despina Hatzifotiadou, will set up a demonstration of the device, bringing music from the furthest part of the cosmos. Al Blatter, jazz pianist, will perform a duet with the cosmos!

Domenico Vicinanza of DANTE/GEANT, UK, has taken the parameters of data from the LHC’s four experiments – ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb – and electronically converted them into sound, then transposed them into music. Vicinanza is known for the sonification of the Voyager explorers leaving our solar system.

The Donald Sinta Quartet, winner of the 2013 Concert Artists Guild Victor Elmaleh competition, will be performing an original piece on the discovery of the Higgs boson, by the award-winning composer, Roger Zare.