What the Big Bang Sounded Like: Recording Reveals Audio of Ancient Universe

What did the Big Bang actually sound like? One researcher may have the answer. John Cramer has created an audio recreation of the event that jumpstarted our universe nearly 14 billion years ago.

In order to recreate the sound of the Big Bang, Cramer used sophisticated data from a satellite mission observing cosmic microwave backgrounds--a faint glow in the universe that acts as a sort of fossilized fingerprint of the event that created our world. He then produced new recordings that fill in higher frequencies in order to create a fuller and richer sound.

Yet this latest version of what the Big Bang "sounded" like isn't Cramer's first attempt. In 2003, he used data from the cosmic microwave background on temperature fluctuations in the very early universe. The data on these wavelength changes were fed into a computer program called Mathematic, which then converted them to sound. The resulting 100-second recording represented the sound from about 380,000 years after the Big Bang until about 760,000 years after the incident. Yet this original version lacked high-frequency structure--something that is now fixed in the current version.

"The original sound waves were not temperature variations, though, but were real sound waves propagating around the universe," said Cramer in a press release.

The recent rendition of what the Big Bang sounded like has an effect similar to what seismologists describe as a magnitude-9 earthquake, causing the entire planet to actually ring. In this case, of course, the ring covered the entire universe.

"Space-time itself is ringing when the universe is sufficiently small," said Cramer in a press release.

As the universe cooled and expanded, it stretched the wavelengths to create sounds that resembled more of a bass instrument. This sound gets lower as the wavelengths are stretched farther and reaches a crescendo before fading away.

Want to hear the Big Bang for yourself? Check out the sound recording here.