Astrophysicist, professor, author, recording artist Fields:Astronomy, astrophysics, space science, planetary science, education, public outreach, innovations, music
Fiorella Terenzi is an Italian-born astrophysicist, author and recording artist who is best known for taking recordings of radio waves from far-away galaxies and turning them into music. She received her doctorate from the University of Milan but is currently based in the United States.
Described by Time magazine as "a cross between Carl Sagan and Madonna",[1] Dr. Terenzi has studied opera and composition at Conservatory G. Verdi, Corsi Popolari Serali and taught physics and astronomy at various U.S. colleges and universities; she is currently on the full-time faculty at Florida International University in Miami.[2][3][4] In research at the Computer Audio Research Laboratory, University of California, San Diego, she pioneered techniques to convert radio waves emanating from distant galaxies into sound,[5][6] with some of the results released by Island Records on her CD Music from the Galaxies.[7][8][9] The goal of her audiofication/sonification of celestial data is to investigate how sound could reflect chemical, dynamical and physical properties of celestial objects, which she calls "Acoustic Astronomy".[10]
In lectures at University of California, San Diego, Stanford, MIT, the Smithsonian Institution, the American Museum of Natural History (NY), and in performances, live and on TV, in the US, Europe, and Japan, Terenzi has combined science and art to awaken people to the wonders of the universe.[25] She has moderated hundreds of panels on science, technology, education and public outreach, from Digital Hollywood to MacWorld, and chaired the "Techno 2000" symposium at Pepperdine University. Terenzi's speaking engagements embrace such topics as "Globalization of Education", "Women in Space", "The Business of Space",[26] "Values for a New Civilization", "Art, Intelligence & Artificial Intelligence" and, most notably, "Heavenly Knowledge"[27] and "Invisible Universe".[28][29][30][31]
Terenzi addressed the New York Times' International Luxury Conference, a two-day event bringing together over 500 business and creative leaders in Miami on December 2–3, 2014, in a talk entitled "The Collaborative Mind: Bridging Astrophysics and Aesthetics", and was interviewed on AriseTV's Arise Xchange news program in connection with her talk.[32][33][34][35][36][37]
On April 2, 2017, Dr. Terenzi spoke at the University of Miami for the premiere of "Universal Language", a documentary film exploring the source of music and vibrations, and their effect on the mind, body and soul, as told through the eyes of a deaf child, and she was previously interviewed for the film during its production.[38]
On October 18, 2018, Dr. Terenzi participated on a panel at the Digital Hollywood Los Angeles event discussing "Women on the Creative Edge: Experiences in a Changing Landscape", and on October 29, 2018 she delivered a talk entitled "Star Songs: Experiencing the Unseeable" at California State University Channel Islands, where she also presented her multimedia musical production "Let's Get Astrophysical" during the spring 2019 semester. On January 23, 2019, Dr. Terenzi also spoke on "The 4 Es of STEM Education: Entertain, Educate, Enthrall and Engage" at California State University, Northridge.
On May 21, 2019, Dr. Terenzi again participated on a panel at the Digital Hollywood Los Angeles event discussing "Women on the Creative Edge: From Film to TV to Athletes, Wellness & Technology".[39]
Career
During her term as Director of New Media at the Miami Museum of Science and Space Transit Planetarium, Terenzi arranged and hosted events, including "National Astronomy Day", produced planetarium shows, including "Stars of the Seasons/Stars of the Sea", developed content for grants, including a NASA grant to deliver earth/space science online for high schools, and spoke at events from the NSF-funded "Girls in Science" program, to the Florida Planetarium Directors Association, to the international State of the World Forum in New York.
FIU's new Stocker AstroScience Center, opened in November 2013,[41] includes an interactive exhibit highlighting Dr. Terenzi's research on the audiofication/sonification of celestial data, entitled "Acoustic Astronomy: The Sounds of the Universe".[42]
Dr. Terenzi organized and hosted a March 2, 2018 event for FIU's College of Arts, Science & Education entitled "Physics & Ferraris", showcasing a variety of exotic Ferrari sports cars and featuring an address by renowned inventor, vehicle designer, and former Walt Disney Imagineering R&D president, Bran Ferren, whose talk explained the physics behind why various vehicles, ranging from airplanes to race cars, work.[43]
On November 18, 2018, FIU presented Dr. Terenzi with its 2018 Torch Award for Outstanding Faculty, honoring the lasting impression she has made on the lives of the university's students and alumni.
Music
Music from the Galaxies (Island/PolyGram Records, 1991)[44]
Trance Planet Vol. 5 – various artists (Triloka Records, 2000)
Dr. Terenzi has also collaborated with Herbie Hancock and Ornette Coleman. Samples of her Music from the Galaxies track "Sidereal Breath" appear on the Massive Attack track "Karmacoma", from the album Protection (Virgin Records, 1995).[48]
In June 2017, Dr. Terenzi appeared on electronic artist Manipulant's (David Speakman) album Eclectro. The song "Doctor, I Need Your Expertise" features Dr. Terenzi describing the sounds of space combined with an electronic backdrop, simulating a journey through the solar system.[49]
Books and publications
Formerly represented by talent/literary agents the William Morris Agency, Terenzi is best known for her CD-ROM Invisible Universe (Voyager Company, 1995),[50][51][52] which blends astronomy and music into an entertaining and enlightening voyage through the stars. The title won the SIGCAT (Special Interest Group on CD Applications and Technology) award for "Most Creative Application of Multimedia in Higher and Adult Education".
Dr. Terenzi is also known for a sexually charged book about science entitled Heavenly Knowledge (Avon Books/Harper Collins), which explores astronomy as a metaphor for human relationships and humanity's place in the universe.[27] The book, covered on ABC Radio, Talk of The Nation, BBC Radio, and SyFy, has been translated into Italian (Musica Dalle Stelle, Sterling Kupfer)[53]—bundled with her music CD Galactically Yours—as well as German (Der Kosmos ist weiblich, Bertelsmann/Goldmann),[54] Latvian and other languages.
Terenzi wrote the foreword for Paula Berinstein's book Making Space Happen: Private Space Efforts and the People Behind Them[26] and has been featured in a full chapter in Laura Woodmansee's Women of Space: Cool Careers on the Final Frontier[55] and in the music and technology book The Art of Digital Music by Kelli Richards and David Battino.[56] She also provided a technical review of the educational text book The Physics of Everyday Phenomena by Thomas Griffith,[57] and University Physics for the Physical and Life Sciences by Philip Kesten and David Tauk.[58]
Outreach and innovations
Among her outreach projects, Dr. Terenzi created the grant-winning "BCC Space & Astronomy Lecture Series", to inspire and educate the public about the universe.[59]
She has developed several learning modules: "The Business of Space", to promote cultural diversity and global awareness about space and astronomy; "Astronomy in Paintings, Frescos, and Engravings", on how art has been used to explain the Universe from stars to galaxies; "Sounds of the Universe: Acoustic Astronomy", to stimulate intellectual curiosity and individual thinking; and an "Invisible Universe" learning module to explore celestial objects in multi-wavelengths.[citation needed]
Dr. Terenzi's lectures combine science and art with knowledge and emotion, a concept she calls "Emotional Learning," based on the 4 "E"s: "Entertain, Educate, Enlighten, and Enthrall." As Terenzi has stated, "When you are engaged on these multiple levels, learning finds an emotional home, and it is remembered forever."[2]
She has created original collections of stellar-themed jewelry designs based on the color and symmetry of stars and galaxies, including GemAllure and Stellare.[60]
Dr. Terenzi premiered her "Let's Get Astrophysical" multimedia show for the Miami Beach Centennial Celebration on March 23, 2015, on the oceanfront Hard Rock Rising stage in South Beach. The show featured the first and only top 15 stellar-themed pop song countdown, including songs from Muse, OneRepublic, Oasis, Incubus, Fall Out Boy, Katy Perry, Hardwell and Daft Punk, combined with live DJs, musicians, dancers and acrobats, plus a laser light show.[61][62][63][64] "Let's Get Astrophysical" was successfully reprised on May 3–4, 2019 at the Arts Under the Stars Festival at California State University Channel Islands.[65]
She is an "Adviser and Scientific Consultant" to the Italian Academy of Food for the "Italian Food in Space" effort, enabling NASA Space Shuttle mission STS-120 (October 23, 2007) to include a unique Italian menu consumed and shared among the astronauts in the International Space Station on the 5th day of its mission. She worked with ASI/ESA astronaut Paolo Nespoli, who was a crew member on the shuttle and ISS.
Terenzi served on the Scientific Advisory Board for the Lifeboat Foundation and on the Foundation's Asteroid/Comet Impacts Board.[66]
Zegna fashion designer Stefano Pilati commissioned Terenzi to create a journey into space, using real images and her acoustic astronomy sounds in a video for Zegna's Fall-Winter 2014 Men's Collection.[67] This new union of fashion and astrophysics was described by the New York Times as "Zegna's Very Big Bang",[68] and generated extensive worldwide publicity.[69][70][71][72][73] "No one has ever done anything like this before", said Gildo Zegna.[68]
A new version of the Zegna video, which was a collaboration between Terenzi, fellow astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Pilati, was entitled "City and Nature – Scientist Cut" and formed the framework of an innovative 23-window display at Harrods, the luxury London department store. From October 2–19, 2014, new "Whispering Window" technology allowed Terenzi's space sounds, accompanied by the music of Tchaikovsky, to be shared with passing pedestrians, in order to demonstrate how science and fashion complement one another.[74]
Related Research Articles
In astronomy, dark matter is a hypothetical form of matter that appears not to interact with light or the electromagnetic field. Dark matter is implied by gravitational effects which cannot be explained by general relativity unless more matter is present than can be seen. Such effects occur in the context of formation and evolution of galaxies, gravitational lensing, the observable universe's current structure, mass position in galactic collisions, the motion of galaxies within galaxy clusters, and cosmic microwave background anisotropies.
A galaxy is a system of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar gas, dust, and dark matter bound together by gravity. The word is derived from the Greek galaxias (γαλαξίας), literally 'milky', a reference to the Milky Way galaxy that contains the Solar System. Galaxies, averaging an estimated 100 million stars, range in size from dwarfs with less than a thousand stars, to the largest galaxies known – supergiants with one hundred trillion stars, each orbiting its galaxy's center of mass. Most of the mass in a typical galaxy is in the form of dark matter, with only a few percent of that mass visible in the form of stars and nebulae. Supermassive black holes are a common feature at the centres of galaxies.
Astronomy is a natural science that studies celestial objects and the phenomena that occur in the cosmos. It uses mathematics, physics, and chemistry in order to explain their origin and their overall evolution. Objects of interest include planets, moons, stars, nebulae, galaxies, meteoroids, asteroids, and comets. Relevant phenomena include supernova explosions, gamma ray bursts, quasars, blazars, pulsars, and cosmic microwave background radiation. More generally, astronomy studies everything that originates beyond Earth's atmosphere. Cosmology is a branch of astronomy that studies the universe as a whole.
Sandra Moore Faber is an American astrophysicist known for her research on the evolution of galaxies. She is the University Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and works at the Lick Observatory. She has made discoveries linking the brightness of galaxies to the speed of stars within them and was the co-discoverer of the Faber–Jackson relation. Faber was also instrumental in designing the Keck telescopes in Hawaii.
Astrophysics is a science that employs the methods and principles of physics and chemistry in the study of astronomical objects and phenomena. As one of the founders of the discipline, James Keeler, said, Astrophysics "seeks to ascertain the nature of the heavenly bodies, rather than their positions or motions in space–what they are, rather than where they are." Among the subjects studied are the Sun, other stars, galaxies, extrasolar planets, the interstellar medium and the cosmic microwave background. Emissions from these objects are examined across all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, and the properties examined include luminosity, density, temperature, and chemical composition. Because astrophysics is a very broad subject, astrophysicists apply concepts and methods from many disciplines of physics, including classical mechanics, electromagnetism, statistical mechanics, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, relativity, nuclear and particle physics, and atomic and molecular physics.
Vera Florence Cooper Rubin was an American astronomer who pioneered work on galaxy rotation rates. She uncovered the discrepancy between the predicted and observed angular motion of galaxies by studying galactic rotation curves. By identifying the galaxy rotation problem, her work provided evidence for the existence of dark matter. These results were later confirmed over subsequent decades.
Beatrice Muriel Hill Tinsley was a British-born New Zealand astronomer and cosmologist, and the first female professor of astronomy at Yale University, whose research made fundamental contributions to the astronomical understanding of how galaxies evolve, grow and die.
Margaret J. Geller is an American astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. Her work has included pioneering maps of the nearby universe, studies of the relationship between galaxies and their environment, and the development and application of methods for measuring the distribution of matter in the universe.
Nancy Grace Roman was an American astronomer who made important contributions to stellar classification and motions. The first female executive at NASA, Roman served as NASA's first Chief of Astronomy throughout the 1960s and 1970s, establishing her as one of the "visionary founders of the US civilian space program".
Robert P. Kirshner is an American astronomer, Chief Program Officer for Science for the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the Clownes Research Professor of Science at Harvard University. Kirshner has worked in several areas of astronomy including the physics of supernovae, supernova remnants, the large-scale structure of the cosmos, and the use of supernovae to measure the expansion of the universe.
Alexei Vladimir "Alex" Filippenko is an American astrophysicist and professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. Filippenko graduated from Dos Pueblos High School in Goleta, California. He received a Bachelor of Arts in physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1979 and a Ph.D. in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology in 1984, where he was a Hertz Foundation Fellow. He was a postdoctoral Miller Fellow at Berkeley from 1984 to 1986 and was appointed to Berkeley's faculty in 1986. In 1996 and 2005, he a Miller Research Professor, and he is currently a Senior Miller Fellow. His research focuses on supernovae and active galaxies at optical, ultraviolet, and near-infrared wavelengths, as well as on black holes, gamma-ray bursts, and the expansion of the Universe.
Knowledge of the location of Earth has been shaped by 400 years of telescopic observations, and has expanded radically since the start of the 20th century. Initially, Earth was believed to be the center of the Universe, which consisted only of those planets visible with the naked eye and an outlying sphere of fixed stars. After the acceptance of the heliocentric model in the 17th century, observations by William Herschel and others showed that the Sun lay within a vast, disc-shaped galaxy of stars. By the 20th century, observations of spiral nebulae revealed that the Milky Way galaxy was one of billions in an expanding universe, grouped into clusters and superclusters. By the end of the 20th century, the overall structure of the visible universe was becoming clearer, with superclusters forming into a vast web of filaments and voids. Superclusters, filaments and voids are the largest coherent structures in the Universe that we can observe. At still larger scales the Universe becomes homogeneous, meaning that all its parts have on average the same density, composition and structure.
Belinda Jane Wilkes is a Senior Astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, and former director of the Chandra X-ray Center.
The Institute for Computational Cosmology (ICC) is a Research Institute at Durham University, England. It was founded in November 2002 as part of the Ogden Centre for Fundamental Physics, which also includes the Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology (IPPP). The ICC's primary mission is to advance fundamental knowledge in cosmology. Topics of active research include: the nature of dark matter and dark energy, the evolution of cosmic structure, the formation of galaxies, and the determination of fundamental parameters.
Alice Eve Shapley is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. She was one of the discoverers of the spiral galaxy BX442. Through her time at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) she has taught Nature of the Universe, Black Holes and Cosmic Catastrophes, Cosmology: Our Changing Concepts of the Universe, Galaxies, Scientific Writing, AGNs, Galaxies, *and* Writing, and The Formation and Evolution of Galaxies and the IGM. Shapley has committed herself to over a two decades of research and publication in the interest of physics and astronomy.
Warrick John Couch is an Australian professional astronomer. He is currently a professor at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. He was previously the Director of Australia's largest optical observatory, the Australian Astronomical Observatory (AAO). He was also the president of the Australian Institute of Physics (2015–2017), and a non-executive director on the Board of the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization. He was a founding non-executive director of Astronomy Australia Limited.
Amanda Elaine Bauer is an American professional astronomer and science communicator. She is the Deputy Director and Head of Science and Education at Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin. She was previously based in Tucson, Arizona, working as Head of Education and Public Outreach at the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. From 2013 to 2016 she was a Research Astronomer at the Australian Astronomical Observatory (AAO). Her principal field of research concerns how galaxies form, how they create new stars, and particularly why they suddenly stop creating new stars.
Laura Ferrarese is a researcher in space science at the National Research Council of Canada. Her primary work has been performed using data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope.
Sabrina Stierwalt is an American extragalactic astrophysicist who studies gas dynamics and the formation and evolution of galaxies through surveys utilizing x-ray, ultraviolet, optical, infrared, submillimeter, and radio wavelengths. She is experienced in science communication and advocating for equality and equity for underrepresented groups in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields.
Rebecca Smethurst, also known as Dr. Becky, is a British astrophysicist, author, and YouTuber who is a junior research fellow at the University of Oxford. She was the recipient of the 2020 Caroline Herschel Prize Lectureship, awarded by the Royal Astronomical Society, as well as the 2020 Mary Somerville Medal and Prize, awarded by the Institute of Physics. In 2022, she won the Royal Astronomical Society's Winton Award "for research by a post-doctoral fellow in Astronomy whose career has shown the most promising development".
1 2 Paula Berinstein (Author) and Dr. Fiorella Terenzi (Foreword), Making Space Happen: Private Space Ventures and the Visionaries Behind Them, Plexus Publishing, 2002, ISBN0-9666748-3-9.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
