The sound samples on this site are made from real and simulated data from the ATLAS detector. Simulated data is used by physicists to determine, for example, what a Higgs Boson decay is going to look like in real data.

The data is first processed using the vast and all-powerful ATLAS software framework. This allows raw data (streams of ones and zeroes) to be converted step-by-step into ‘objects’ such as silicon detector hits and energy deposits. We can reconstruct particles using these objects. The next step is to convert the information into a file containing two or three columns of numbers known as a "breakpoint file". It can also be used as a "note list". This kind of file can be read by compositional software such as the Composers Desktop Project (CDP) and Csound software used for this project.

Yes! Any data can, in principle, be sonified. NASA are currently using sonification to listen to the sun and have made sonifications of the planets in the past. Seismic (earthquake and volcano) data has been sonified to great use. You can even sonify a painting, photograph or moving image, which has been done and has enabled blind people to see.