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PODCAST

Far Wide Radio

Far Wide Radio translates telescope data into sound. Each programme works from a single James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) or Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) spectral cube, read directly by custom-made algorithms — no illustration, no mood music laid over a picture. Four instruments make the series. A batch engine sonifies a chosen field of the data — brightness, gradient, boundary, obstruction, lines, flow, holonomy, anisotropy — on a fixed bench: image row becomes pitch, column becomes

arts astronomy

All Episodes

18:14

The Telescope in the Signal

Far Wide Radio ·

2026/08/19

The one that should have been caught earlier.An instrument does not see a rectangle. It sees a tilted patch inside one, and reflecting the frame about its diagonal moves that patch — so every pixel the telescope covered on one side of the mirror and not the other is subtracted against nothing and comes back at full strength. Across sixty-four cubes, that edge is most of what this technique was reporting. On the worst of them it is 99.6% of it. The first movement is one such cube with the edge left

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18:38

Where the Colours Stop Agreeing

Far Wide Radio ·

2026/08/19

Five spectral cubes, where time runs along the spectrum. These are not photographs. Each is a stack of thousands of images of the same patch of sky, one for every colour the instrument can separate. The subtraction is the same as in episode one, but the scan now moves along the colour axis, so travelling through a piece is travelling through the spectrum. What you are listening for is where in that spectrum a field stops being its own mirror. A protostellar jet, a lensed arc, a quasar host, an

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10:04

The Moon That Kept Itself

Far Wide Radio ·

2026/08/19

Titan, four filters, and a listening test. One target, one detector, one subarray, one scoring, one scale, one gain. The only thing that varies across these four movements is the colour of the light — and how much of the field survived being subtracted from its own reflection. A moon is a disc, and a disc in the middle of a frame is very nearly its own mirror image. At 1.87 and 2.12 microns the disc carries the frame and the movement is quiet. At 3.0 and 4.66 microns it does not, and the movement

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17:58

The Line Through the Corner

Far Wide Radio ·

2026/08/19

Five photographs of the sky, each subtracted from its own reflection. Reflect a frame about the diagonal that runs from one corner to the other, and subtract the reflection from the original. Wherever the mirror gave the field back exactly, the two cancel and nothing sounds. Everything you hear is what it failed to return. The series is named for the part you cannot hear. The Cosmic Cliffs first, then a planetary nebula that really is round and is audibly quieter for it, then five galaxies scattered

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3:53

Study Series 6 — Field Asymmetry

Far Wide Radio ·

2026/08/18

A NIRCam frame minus its own transpose, read across the detector. Silence would mean a perfectly symmetric field. What sounds is the asymmetry, and nothing else. Choir and timpani. Source data: public JWST observations obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) at the Space Telescope Science Institute, operated by AURA under NASA contract NAS 5-03127. Programs #1191, #1257, #1328, #1621, #2457, #2484, #2727, #2731, #2732, #2733, #2736, #2926, #4426, #4523, #4528, #5086, #5883. We

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3:38

Study Series 5 — Four Faces, One Cube

Far Wide Radio ·

2026/08/18

Discrete notes instead of continuous sound: one scale degree per frame, repeats merged, so a note sounds only when the data moves. This is the edge-activity face of the cube, on marimba, in D Dorian. Rendered identically but driven by brightness, the same three minutes plays a third as many notes. The choice of which feature drives pitch turns out to matter far more than the choice of scale, and this is what that sounds like. Source data: public JWST observations obtained from the Mikulski Archive

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3:33

Study Series 4 — The Carillon

Far Wide Radio ·

2026/08/18

Brightness bands read through real bell partials — inharmonic, the way a bell actually rings — where the contrast of a band chooses the size of the bell that sounds it. Twelve distinct pitches in three and a half minutes: the sparsest and most physical thing in the collection. Shell changes ring rather than step. Source data: public JWST observations obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) at the Space Telescope Science Institute, operated by AURA under NASA contract NAS

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2:35

Study Series 3 — Edge Pitch

Far Wide Radio ·

2026/08/18

The repaired mapping, alone. Pitch here is driven by edge activity — a channel that survives having the cube shuffled — rather than by brightness, which does not. It is the first melody this instrument has produced that a control cannot reproduce, and the whole of Series 2 is arranged around getting to it. Whole-tone tuning, so the scale samples pitch as evenly as twelve tones allow and the data’s own movement is quantised as little as possible. Source data: public JWST observations obtained from

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3:34

Study Series 2 — Depth Gradient

Far Wide Radio ·

2026/08/18

The same cube minus itself, shifted eight slices along the wavelength axis. The residual is how fast the cube changes with wavelength: this is the only piece in the collection that sonifies a rate of change rather than a value. Oboe and bassoon, and long stretches where the cube is changing so smoothly that nothing sounds at all. A note on the silences: this piece runs quiet for 1m37s in total, the longest stretch 56 seconds. Nothing is wrong with the file. The silence is the recording, and here it

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3:35

Study Series 1 — Cosmic Rays

Far Wide Radio ·

2026/08/18

A spectral cube minus a three-by-three median filter of itself. A median filter eats single-pixel spikes, so what is left over is the detector talking about itself: hot pixels, cosmic ray hits, bad samples. Each note is one defect. Music box and timpani. Half of it is silence, because most of the detector is behaving. A note on the silences: this piece runs quiet for 55 seconds in total, the longest stretch 55 seconds. Nothing is wrong with the file. The silence is the recording, and here it carries

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25:20

Twelve Times Slower

Far Wide Radio ·

2026/08/18

One piece, one frame, four million pixels — and an accident we kept. The traversal was asked for two minutes of audio from a NIRCam frame 2048 pixels square. A frame that size cannot be walked at sixty frames a second, so the recorder kept running while the traversal crawled, about twelve times slower than real time, until the process was stopped from outside. What you hear is a two-minute piece stretched by its own arithmetic to twenty-five. Nothing was time-stretched afterwards. The clock was

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37:29

Residuals

Far Wide Radio ·

2026/08/18

Twelve subtractions. Nothing here is a rendering of data. Two files are put on one shared scale and taken away from each other, and the residual is sonified so that agreement is silence and only disagreement sounds. The sign splits between two voices, one panned to each side. A cube minus a blur of itself is its own fine structure. A cube minus a median of itself is the detector’s defects — hot pixels, cosmic ray hits, single bad samples. A cube minus a surrogate that kept its Fourier amplitudes and

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33:40

What the Frame Cannot Say

Far Wide Radio ·

2026/08/18

The programme where the instrument is caught, and then repaired. Twice here a piece is followed by its ghost: the same render, made the same way, from the same cube after every value in it was shuffled into a random position. They are very hard to tell apart. That is the finding rather than a lapse of attention — measured, the feature driving pitch is statistically indistinguishable between the real cube and the shuffle. Then the mapping is changed. Pitch is driven by edge activity, a channel that

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42:34

The Ladder

Far Wide Radio ·

2026/08/18

Thirteen readings of the same instruction, forty-two minutes long. Each view of a data cube is quantised into eight brightness bands. The piece steps through those bands while the view itself advances in depth, weighted so that depth carrying more structure takes more time. That instruction never changes here. What changes is the tuning it lands on: struck gamelan bronze, real bell partials where the contrast of a band picks the size of the bell, quarter tones, a raga over a fixed drone, a

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114:51

Field Series 10 — Field 5086, NIRSpec G235H

Far Wide Radio ·

2026/07/29

The last of the Field Series: jw05086, first observation, NIRSpec G235H withF170LP — the same instrument configuration as Episode 7, a different programme and a different piece of sky. Fourteen minutes of the most distinctive passages, ninety-three minutes of the open field running brightness, obstruction, gradient and into lines, and seven minutes of the fifty rarest to finish. This cube is led by its spectral lines. More than a quarter of the distinctive suite comes from the line reading —

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114:52

Field Series 9 — Field 4528, NIRSpec G395H

Far Wide Radio ·

2026/07/29

jw04528 through NIRSpec’s G395H grating with F290LP — the longest wavelengths and highest resolution the instrument offers, the far end of its near-infrared reach. Fourteen minutes of the most distinctive passages, ninety-three minutes of the open field, seven minutes of the rarest. This is the most sharply divided cube in the series. A quarter of its distinctive suite is plain brightness — more than any other field here — so the opening is the most straightforwardly luminous fourteen minutes in the

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114:51

Field Series 8 — Field 4426, NIRSpec G140M

Far Wide Radio ·

2026/07/29

jw04426 again, third observation, this time G140M with F100LP — the shortest wavelengths NIRSpec’s medium-resolution gratings reach, on the same field Episode 10 reads further into the infrared. Three movements as before: the hundred most distinctive passages over fourteen minutes, the open field for ninety-three, the fifty rarest over seven. The shift down in wavelength shows. Lines, brightness and gradient are near level at the top of the distinctive suite — three readings that all respond

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114:52

Field Series 7 — Field 4426, NIRSpec G235M

Far Wide Radio ·

2026/07/29

jw04426, first observation, NIRSpec G235M with F170LP — the medium-resolution grating over the same wavelength range that the high-resolution G235H covers in Episodes 7 and 13. Coarser sampling, wider coverage per exposure. Fourteen minutes of the hundred most distinctive passages, ninety-three minutes of the open field at twenty-four minutes per reading, seven minutes of the fifty rarest. Holonomy is unusually prominent here — the plaquette round-trip of the Doppler field, nonzero only where the

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114:50

Field Series 6 — Field 2926, MIRI channel 1 medium

Far Wide Radio ·

2026/07/29

The other half of the pair. Same JWST programme, same MIRI channel, second observation, one sub-band longer — jw02926-o002 where Episode 8 was o001. If the series has a controlled comparison in it, this is that comparison. The build is identical: fourteen minutes of the hundred most distinctive passages, ninety-three minutes of the open field running brightness, obstruction, gradient and into lines, seven minutes of the fifty rarest. What changed with the sub-band: brightness still leads the

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114:50

Field Series 5 — Field 2926, MIRI channel 1 short

Far Wide Radio ·

2026/07/29

jw02926, first observation, through MIRI’s first spectrometer channel at its short sub-band — the shortest wavelengths the mid-infrared spectrometer covers, and its narrowest field of view. Fourteen minutes of the hundred most distinctive passages; ninety-three minutes of the open field, twenty-four minutes to each reading; seven minutes of the fifty rarest to close. This cube is legible. Its distinctive suite is led by the plainest readings available — raw brightness, gradient, obstruction, lines,

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