Asteroid Tunes
Ryan Powell
Date: May 17, 2019
Major: music
Genre/Medium: music, programming, and Xcode
About the work: I created this app with the intention of it being educational, musical, and fun. I took the Solar System and scaled it down 31,536,000 times, turning the years of the orbital periods into seconds. Then I correlated the distance from the Sun to pitches on an 88-key keyboard. I chose these five asteroids because they each had very defining characteristics—each the largest of their kind. Essentially, the pitches are determined by the asteroids’ distances from the Sun, and the orbital periods become the rhythms that the pitches are played. It was a lot of fun to make, and I brought back some of my experience in Xcode, writing in Swift! Credit to fellow intern Jessika Raisor for the adorable asteroid artwork!
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