AINEWS
Antarctic researchers turned space weather into a music album
The British Antarctic Survey and partner artists transformed radio signals from a giant spider like antenna into Infinitas Formas, drawing on data from solar winds and lightning.
The British Antarctic Survey and partner artists transformed radio signals from a giant spider like antenna into Infinitas Formas, drawing on data from solar winds and lightning.
Most space weather data ends up on a graph. This week, some of it ended up on an album.
The British Antarctic Survey released Infinitas Formas on June 15, 2026, the product of a collaboration between research scientist Nigel Meredith and a team of professional artists. The album takes radio signals captured by a giant spider-like antenna planted on the Antarctic ice, including pulses triggered by solar winds and lightning that ripple around the planet along magnetic field lines, and reshapes them into music a person can sit with. The result, Meredith told Science News, sounds like 'weird and wonderful noises' with a melodic quality.
The data starts far away. The sun constantly exhales a stream of charged particles called the solar wind, and lightning strikes in the lower atmosphere release their own electromagnetic bursts. Both send very low frequency radio waves spiraling around the planet along magnetic field lines. Antarctica's isolation makes the survey's antenna a uniquely quiet place to catch that signal.
The survey uses the same recordings to study space weather. The institution has also framed space weather as a potential influence on Earth's climate, a connection it promotes in its public materials. The album sits in a different lane: the music is an artistic translation, not evidence of the climate link.
Inside the survey's research workflow, those recordings become graphs and spectrograms. For the album, the artists worked with Meredith to map amplitude, frequency, and timing into notes, tempos, and textures. The same data flows through both pipelines, but only one of them is meant for the ear.
The release gives the public a new way to hear what the survey's scientists hear. Whether Infinitas Formas reaches beyond the science-curious remains the open question, but the pipeline is no longer a sketch: Antarctica's magnetic chorus now has a release date.