'Sound' of Higgs boson created

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CAMBRIDGE, England, July 11 (UPI) -- "Sonified" data from experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland makes it possible to "hear" the newly discovered Higgs boson, researchers say.

The result, they said, is a melody that resembles the syncopated rhythm of the habanera, a Cuban dance popular in Spain in the early 19th century.

"As soon as the [Higgs discovery] announcement was made, we begun working on the sonification of the experimental data," Domenico Vicinanza, of Dante (Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe), in Cambridge, England, told Discovery News.

"Sonification worked by attaching a musical note to each data. So, when you hear the resulting melody you really are hearing the data," Vicinanza said.

The researchers mapped intervals between values in the original data set to intervals between notes in the melody, and numerical values were associated to a musical note.

As the values increased or decreased, the pitch of the notes grew or diminished accordingly, they said.

"The discovery of the Higgs-like particle is a major step forward in our knowledge of the world around us. By using sonification we are able to make this breakthrough easier to understand by the general public," Vicinanza said.