The Radioactive Orchestra is a project launched by the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology and the Nuclear Power & Safety organisation. In creative collaboration with musician Axel Boman, Swedish nuclear scientists worked to turn radiation into music by translating the different energy levels of individual isotopes to sound frequences.

Our goal is to inspire everyone to learn natural science by making it playful and beautiful. This is a new way to understand radiation and atoms.

The linked project website allows each visitor to compose their own atomic piece.

Melodies are created by stimulating what happens in the atomic nucleus when it decays from an excited nuclear state down to its ground state.

In this process a single gamma photon is released for every step of energy loss. We let the photon play a note where the energy of the photon is represented by the pitch of the note.

This video shows some beautiful details of the process:

Via Laughing Squid.