The Solar System Generates This Music Box's Rhythms

The solar system is like dart board with the sun as the bullseye. As the planets revolve around the sun, they cross a line that plucks a note.

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We all learned the order of the planets in elementary school. Our textbooks laid them out neatly before us, one after the other like a row of marbles. We memorized them using mnemonics like My Very Energetic Mother Just Served Us Nine Pickles, but barely grasped the scope of what we were reading.

Our solar system is vast and complex---far too vast and complex to be rendered as static illustrations. It has movement, a rhythm, all its own.

Not unlike that of a music box, says Luke Twyman.

Twyman is an illustrator and graphic designer from England. Five years ago he created SolarBeat, a Flash website that turned the solar system’s orbital frequency into a celestial music box. He recently re-released SolarBeat, updating the interface, graphics, and sound controls to create an even more stunning experience.

In Twyman’s visualization every planet is (somewhat arbitrarily) assigned a note. “It needed to have some kind of harmony to it, so it wasn’t just chaos,” he explains. The solar system is laid out like dart board with the sun as the bullseye. As the planets revolve around the sun, they cross an arbitrary line that plucks a note. To continue the music box metaphor, think of the planets as the pins of the solar system, and the line as the teeth.

Because every planet has its own orbital period, “it ends up generating this unending, interesting pattern,” Twyman says. For example, Mercury, which has an orbit of 88 Earth days, is the backbeat to the sound, while Pluto, which takes approximately 248 years to orbit the sun, rarely makes an appearance in the music. “It really lends itself to generating ambient music,” he says. You can tweak the speed of orbit, slowing it down to make a soothing tinkle of a child’s mobile or speeding it up to orchestrate a chaotic planetary choir. New features allow you to add sound effects like echo, flutter and bass, and you can choose from eight different chords to personalize the sound.

SolarBeat isn't scientifically accurate---planets don’t orbit from the same starting line, for one thing, and no orbit is perfectly circular---but that's fine. A good visualization is accurate, sure, but more importantly, it's clear and concise enough to help people make sense of a challenging concept. It also helps that Twyman's website doesn't feel like an education---it feels like a toy. "I liked the idea of it being playful," he says. "It helps people understand or be excited about a subject."