he composition begins with a deep, almost futuristic-sounding tremor. It’s quickly joined by a piccolo’s lilting melody.

A woman’s voice begins the narration: “The X-ray sky: each dot is not a star but a black hole. Nested at the heart of every galaxy, they are the conductors of a cosmic symphony.”

The rest of the orchestra joins in, swelling into a crescendo before a sudden pause. A powerful bass cuts through the silence, combining the strings, woodwinds, and brass of the orchestra with electronic synth music.

This is the first movement of the Black Hole Symphony, also known as “The Blazar,” after a black hole that shoots beams of superheated matter from its center. The beams of matter move almost at the speed of light, making the Blazar one of the universe’s brightest observable objects. So much so that in some cases, it is bright enough to outshine the entire galaxy around it.

In the Black Hole Symphony, composer David R. Ibbett tries to translate that disruption into music.

Ibbett has spent years learning to hear what the universe is doing. Working with astrophysicists at Harvard and the Smithsonian’s joint Center for Astrophysics, he developed a strategy to turn the shapes and patterns of cosmic objects into sound. “There are certain shapes the universe loves to make,” he says. “Circles, rings, toruses — they’re not perfect circles, so you can listen to the way that things deviate from a circle. That produces an interesting melody itself.”

For centuries, composers have written music about the biggest things they could imagine — God, death, fate. For astrophysicists, however, the topic of equal scope is the black hole.

“Astrophysics can connect with the whole of human experience. It’s not something that’s distant and far off. It’s something that can inspire us every day. It answers the fundamental questions about why we’re all here,” Ibbett says.

This connection between astrophysics and the human experience inspired Ibbett to create the Black Hole Symphony, one of the many performances in the Multiverse Concert Series, a nonprofit initiative that seeks to combine art and science through experimentation with performance forms.

The organization has produced 18 projects, each combining music with research on topics from coral reefs to neutrinos to genomics. One of the Multiverse’s early projects, which premiered in 2019, was “Cellular Dance: The Fold,” a performance that combined music and ballet with cell biology.

The Black Hole Symphony is one of the organization’s more recent productions. Since 2022, it has reached more than 5,000 audience members across 30 performances.

For Anna Barnacka, who left a career in astrophysics and later became the Series’ science officer, music can make the “complex language of math and physics” — and thus, an understanding of our universe — more accessible. Scientists, she argues, have a responsibility to share what they find.

That sense of shared collective wonder and curiosity has precedent.

“Scientists have a process that they go through of creativity and always questioning. I think artists and musicians are on that same path. They also question. They are also on a voyage of discovery,” says Sheperd “Shep” S. Doeleman. Doeleman, an astrophysicist, led the project that produced the first photograph of a black hole in 2019.

To Ibbett, music is especially good at conveying the complexities of the universe and its phenomena that scientists have so creatively discovered.“It’s so richly complicated,” Ibbett says, “but often music gets that sort of thing across in a much clearer way than a graph or a table.”

The most recent performance of the Black Hole Symphony was on April 18 in New Hampshire, led by music director and conductor Tianhui Ng. Ng’s collaboration with the Multiverse Concert Series began almost three years ago.

“I was really struck when I opened the score, because it was a really fresh voice,” Ng says. “I can’t think of too many people who are writing at this intersection of science and music with such integrity.”

Part of what might make this voice so distinctive is Ibbett’s willingness to let scientific data transform the instruments themselves. In collaboration with scientists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Ibbett used a technique called sonification to translate electromagnetic data from a black hole into music.

When translating light frequencies from stars with low metal content, Ibbett found that the resulting microtonal intervals fell between the keys of a standard piano. Rather than approximating these notes, he built a custom electronic instrument he calls a “star piano” — a hybrid of piano and xylophone timbre capable of playing the precise frequencies the data demanded.

It fell to Ng to bring that unusual sonic language to life in the concert hall. As a conductor, Ng says that, in general, his principal role is to interpret the score and “to try to get as close as possible to what the composer is imagining, as opposed to just what is written.” It took experimental workshops with the orchestra for Ng to translate Ibbett’s vision into reality.

“I think often about how much of a privilege it is that in the world of the arts, we gather hundreds, if not thousands, of people into a space to think about something together,” Ng says.

Barnacka, too, speaks to the beauty of music’s ability to bring people together.

“In the era of AI, we’re trying to think about what distinguishes us,” Barnacka says. “I believe it’s that we need art. We need that feeling of awe about the universe we are in.”

—Magazine writer Maria Borrell Ferrero can be reached at [email protected].