Songs From The Periodic Table

video upload by Cinematic Laboratory

"If each element in the periodic table has a spectrum that can be used to idenfity it, each color in the spectrum can be converted to a frequency. So each element has a distinct sound signature, a scale. It's not easy to make them audible, but with a stack of tone generators you should be able to set it up. You can approach this with additive synthesis - creating sinewave partials for each frequency band, but approaching it as scales is much more intriguing. Each element has its own 'microtonal scale' and some of them are quite beautiful when you compose in the key of Mother Nature.

This experiment feels like actual sonic Alchemy where you can turn the sound of Lead into the sound of Gold, the sound of water - or even 'listen' to the five elements of our DNA. Also, these frequencies have nothing to do with the actual vibration frequency of a atom. Oxygen, for instance, vibrates at 60 GHz and there's no way you can hear it.

I used Droid Master with an array of LFO's running at audio rates to recreate a spectrum's frequency bands (with two digit decimal precision). I found the conversion tables on https://musicoftheperiodictable.com."