Protons and neutrons each consist of three quarks, held together by a force we do not perceive in everyday life. Such three-quark systems can be excited and then vibrate in different states, much like a bell or a cymbal whose sound depends on its symmetry properties and on how it is struck. The difference is that here, not only frequency but mass itself becomes an excited state.
Two competing models locate the cause of the spectral patterns differently. In One Gluon Exchange (OGE), the quarks exchange gluons, the carrier particles of the strong force. In Goldstone Boson Exchange (GBE), they exchange Goldstone bosons, particles that arise from a broken symmetry. The predictions of the two models lie close together without coinciding. This difference is our material. Takten von Masse (Studies in Timing Spectra) (2026) opens up an acoustic space of comparison: two mass spectra of the same baryons, minimally offset against one another. Purpose-built synthesis methods translate mass states into resonances, neighbouring values into beats, spectral orderings into rhythmic distributions. Pitch and time appear as parametrisations of one and the same oscillatory process. Experimental data from Jülich adds a further layer. Model, experiment, representation and perception are thus brought into a relationship from which, at best, a new intuition for data and models may emerge.
If two explanations proceed from opposing assumptions and predict almost the same observations, that is, if they are underdetermined, do they still explain anything? OGE and GBE differ not so much in what they predict as in what they assume to be the cause. Masses can be measured; whether a gluon or a Goldstone boson was involved cannot. Somewhere, then, runs a boundary beyond which no science is possible without interpretation.
Knowledge is often preceded by an intuition that calculation and measurement only catch up with later. Such a vague sense of orientation is not simply given; it requires models, images, or indeed sonification.
Understanding usually begins in confusion. The particle physicist Harrison Prosper speaks of an "acoustic adventure", a data space that can be walked through as a shifting soundscape. The sonic representation acts as a medium of orientation and disorientation alike. Prosper frames the relationship between model and representation as a coherent story: "If I find that my prediction agrees with what I observe, then I am contented, because I have a story that is coherent." Empirical agreement establishes coherence; what actually corresponds to reality remains untouched by it. This is one particular conception of truth. In our view, science can sustain long phases of incoherence, which is not only historically documented but also has reasons rooted in the subject matter itself. Representational methods such as sonification should therefore not merely be harnessed to tell a story that leaves everyone more contented.
Takten von Masse builds on Bonner Durchmusterung (2009, Schmickler, de Campo et al.), an early example of computer-generated sound synthesis in data-based sonification. Its tenth movement translated baryon mass spectra into sound; the idea came from de Campo's work Science by Ear, whose Quantum Spectra Browser maps energy differences onto frequencies and makes constituent quark models comparable by ear. As the appendix to a cosmological panorama, the movement remained a glimpse ahead; seventeen years later it has become an independent study.
The IEM in Graz is an important point of reference here: as early as 2009–10, Alberto de Campo and the SonEnvir research group around Katharina Vogt made quantum spectra audible there as spacings, superpositions and splittings. The 2010 performance of Bonner Durchmusterung at the Science by Ear 2 conference led to contact with Julian Rohrhuber, which resulted, among other things, in the joint WDR production Politiken der Frequenz (2011), in which number systems, the continuum and the surreal numbers appeared as acoustic operations. At the time, Rohrhuber was working on a research project with the physicists Henri Kowalski and Tobias Haas at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY).
Composition, Sonifikation: Marcus Schmickler
Dramaturgy, Sonifikation: Julian Rohrhuber
Scientific Support: Dr. Arunima Bhattacharya,
Dr. Deborah Rönchen, Prof. Harrison B. Prosper
Thanks to Science by Ear, Dr. Michael Hoch
Commisioned by ORF musikprotokoll.
Supported by the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung und der VGR –
Verwertungsgesellschaft Rundfunk.