The Higgs Boson has lead to an explosion of creativity. First, the Guerilla Science team has produced a Secret Garden Party (July 19 – 22, 2012) featuring the Higgs Boson. Here’s a video clip from the 2012 event,

Zoe Cormier (writer and Guerilla Science co-founder) notes in her July 27, 2012 posting on the Guardian science blogs,

The Particle Zoo Safari, hosted by Guerilla Science at the Secret Garden Party arts and music festival last weekend, observed the formation of another proton and hydrogen atom, the sparring of two combative electrons, polyamorous covalent bond formation, sunlight manufacture through fusion (and a ping pong ball), and the creation of deuterium – complete with dubstep to mirror the atomic weight of the heavy form of hydrogen.

With polystyrene magnets our audience-cum-collider recreated the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to produce the star of the show: the Higgs boson, sumo-suited and angry, the weightiest particle of all. “I’m hungry,” it grumpily announced, before we threw a net over it and dragged it into the tent. Too much had been spent on the particle’s discovery to let it escape now.

“The idea of the safari came from a colloquialism in physics, which refers to the set of standard particles that make up the entire universe as the ‘particle zoo’,” explains Patrick Stevenson-Keating, the designer we enlisted to help us devise a new way to explore particle physics. “This scale of subatomic particles is so different to our everyday world that there are few comparisons you can really make, so it was challenging to visualise some of the concepts.”

Here’s what the science consultant had to say about it (from Cormier’s posting),

“When I was first approached to take part, I did think it sounded a bit nuts actually, but in the end it worked out reasonably well in terms of the science – I think most people would at least remember that quarks come in threes, and they are difficult to pull apart,” says Dr James Monk of the University College London, a particle physicist who works on the Atlas experiment on the LHC, whom we enlisted as a scientific consultant. “These particles and forces are important to understand how the world works, and it wouldn’t be fitting if physicists said that we do all this fantastic research – but the rest of you can’t possibly understand it.”

It’s well worth reading Cormier’s whole post and you might even feel like taking another look at the video (I found it embedded in Cormier’s posting)  after reading.

(Last year, I featured Guerilla Science and Cormier in my July 12, 2011 posting.)

Meanwhile, the Higgs is producing music. According to David Bruggeman’s July 28, 2012 posting on his Pasco Phronesis blog,

While it seems unlikely that papers will soon come as .mp3 files with audio infographics, some are still working on hearing things we usually expect to see.

…

The idea is to match energy levels found in the data with particular notes.  That way shifts in energy can be more immediately expressed as shifts in tone.  The Higgs boson peaks out of the background noise – noise that isn’t really noise from a musical perspective.

David is hoping turning data into music could be used in the future for educational purposes,

… for those who have an easier time detecting patterns in audio rather than printed data, this could be a very productive development.

I thought it would be interesting to hear some Higgs Boson music. While this piece is based on Higgs data, the composer has taken liberties after letting you hear what the untreated melody sounds like,

The composer, Ben McCormack, had this to say about the piece titled, Higgs Boson (ATLAS preliminary data),

The data was already converted to notes by Domenico Vicinanza. I then consolidated the melody to remove a lot of the large leaps, giving it a slightly better flow.

Before you say anything, I know that this (at least somewhat) defeats the purpose of the data. I’m a composer; my goal was primarily to make a fun piece of music. I inverted the melody and wrote countermelodies that aren’t mathematically-related to the original melody, so consider this more a creative work than an exercise in data analysis.

You can find out more about the Higgs Boson in my July 4, 2012 posting where I wrote about the then latest announcement from CERN (European Particle Physics Laboratory).