Material’s research | A Spanish research project positions as a pioneer in the manufacture of musical instruments made from dust and rocks coming from the surface of the Moon and Mars.
Humanity, from its origins, has transformed nature to create music. And in this decade that heralds the colonization of Mars and the Moon, musical instrument designer Carlos Traginer asked himself the following question: what does music made exclusively with Lunar and Martian materials sound like?
To answer this curiosity, Traginer conceived the Hypate Project. During this research, which is already in its first phase of development, ceramic percussion instruments, such as bells and shakers, will be manufactured using simulants of lunar and Martian regolith. Regolith consists of that first layer of unconsolidated soil formed by small fragments of rock and loose minerals. To obtain this compound, the research has partnered with Exolith Lab, an entity that collaborates directly with NASA. In parallel, the Hypate team will create ceramic instruments with terrestrial materials to compare afterwards the acoustic properties of both instrument lines.
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Hypate Project brings together a group of top-level collaborators from all the involved disciplines: ceramic artists, researchers from the CSIC and the Polytechnic University of Valencia, geologists and specialists in acoustics. Among some of those names we count with doctor in Geological sciences Jesús Martínez Frías, an expert in Meteorites, Planetary Geology and Astrobiology, and Pedro Barceló, Joaquín Sabina’s drummer, who throughout his extensive career has collaborated with artists such as Joan Manuel Serrat or Jorge Drexler.
This project, absolutely pioneering in this world, opens the door to new study fields, like exoacoustics or exoluthery. “Our long-term dream is that humans can manufacture musical instruments on the Moon or on Mars, using materials obtained there”, says Traginer. At the rate that the exploration of the Universe is currently progressing, perhaps within a few decades this dream will materialize as a revolution for musical instruments and the sounds known to humans.
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