Gamma-Ray Sonnets: An Algorithmic Bridge Between Astrophysical Violence and Human Emotion

This project is an intimate experiment in translation, not between languages, but between domains of knowledge and feeling. It asks: what poetic form emerges when the most violent processes in the universe—gamma-ray emissions from supernovae, pulsars, and black holes—are made to guide the construction of a human poem?

The result is a Markov chain-based poetic generator, where the transition probabilities between words are not learned from a text corpus alone, but are directly dictated by gamma-ray source maps from NASA’s Fermi Large Area Telescope (Fermi-LAT). The most energetic regions of the sky nudge the algorithm towards specific word choices, forging a fragile, algorithmic link between cosmic violence and personal lexicon.

The Process: A Cosmic-Creative Pipeline

• The Corpus (The Human Voice): A personal collection of poems, letters, and song lyrics—many written during a period of intense personal reflection—forms the raw linguistic material.

• The Sky Map (The Cosmic Signal): A gamma-ray map of a specific region of interest (ROI) is processed and normalized to become a probability matrix. The intensity of each pixel determines the “weight” of a potential word transition.

• The Algorithm (The Translator): A modified Markov chain navigates the corpus. At each step, the next word is chosen not by textual frequency alone, but by the energetic imprint of the corresponding sky coordinate. The most luminous astrophysical sources exert the strongest pull on the poem’s direction.

• The Refinement (The Human Touch): The raw, “naive” output—often grammatically fractured—is gently corrected by a large language model (LLM) and final manual curation. The algorithm provides the seed, shaped by the stars; the artist cultivates the sprout into a coherent, emotional utterance.

• The Output: A Curated Selection of Cosmic-Personal Verse

The algorithm was run hundreds of times. The poems presented here are not random outputs, but curated selections that resonated with the author’s intended emotional spectrum—melancholy, longing, fragmentation, and resilience. They are co-authored: by the personal history in the corpus, by the chaotic mathematics of the Markov process, and by the silent, violent symphony of gamma rays from a specific patch of sky observed in early 2020.

Example:

“I see your wounds, they consume me. Every single thing for your innocence. Humanity reveals my deep wound, a game played in passing hours. Someone dwells within your innocence.”

Conceptual Core: Art as a Lifeline and a Bridge

This work is deeply personal. It emerged not only from a scientific curiosity about data sonification (in this case, “lexification”) but from a personal need for expression and connection during a challenging time, much like the artists referenced in its inspiration (Van Gogh, the film Paterson). It demonstrates that scientific data can be more than a source of graphs; it can be a participant in the creative act, imposing a structure that is both arbitrary (to human emotion) and profoundly physical (to the universe).

The project is a testament to a specific kind of beauty: one found at the intersection of mathematical rigor (Markov chains, astrophysical data processing) and the raw, unstructured need for human expression. It’s a proof-of-concept that our tools for understanding the cosmos can also become tools for understanding ourselves.

Explore the Code & The Full Collection:

• Read the source article: Astrophysical-Narratives.harvard.edu