To arrive at their tune, the team attached a musical note to each data point from the Atlas project, mapping the intervals between values in the original data set to the intervals between notes in the melody. As the values increased or decreased, the pitch of the notes grew -- and diminished -- accordingly.

"In this way, any regularity in the scientific data can be naturally mapped to the melody," Vicinanza told Discovery News. So if the data in question are periodic -- that is, marked by a repeated cycle -- then "the sonification will be a music melody which will have the same periodicity and regularity."

And when there was an anomaly in the set -- as in the high F depicted in the score above -- the melody reflected the interruption. That series of octave-jumping notes -- F, C, E? That's the Higgs.

Or, well: It corresponds to the Higgs. The sonification project is a creative extension of existing data, rather than new data themselves. The Atlas-gathered information makes for a lovely pattern; that pattern, however, is the result of relatively arbitrary assignations. "By using sonification we are able to make this breakthrough easier to understand by the general public," Vicinanza says. But it might be more accurate to say that sonification makes the Higgs breakthrough easier to sense. The Higgs discovery is notoriously difficult to understand in part because it is notoriously difficult to feel: We can't see it, we can't taste it, we can't smell it. This is why metaphors used to describe the particle -- from bubbles to Bieber -- are both common and not terribly helpful. Whatever was proven or almost-proven last week, the Higgs remains, for most of us, effectively theoretical. Higgs! The Musical is one way to make it slightly -- just slightly -- more real.

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