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We can't see Fast Radio Bursts but we can now hear them thanks to a Finnish Cathedral

As pulses of radio waves, our eyes haven't evolved to see FRBs, nor can we hear them as they aren't sound waves.

✦ Extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting•From 1 source•1 min read•Updated November 11, 2026, 9:00 PM UTC
Key points
  • Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are among the most extreme events in the universe, releasing as much energy in a millisecond as the sun puts out in three days and briefly outshining entire galaxies.
  • "Artist and composer Andrew Melchior turned all of the CHIME bursts into sound for "The Logos," an installation that has played daily at Oulu Cathedral in Finland since early April and is scheduled to run through the end of the year.
  • Each burst arrives with its high frequencies first and sweeps downward, stretched by its journey through intergalactic gas, "and you can hear that dispersion as it falls from the dome," Melchior told Space.com by email.

Melchior and Kiyoshi Masui, an associate professor of physics at MIT, "sonified" the bursts, translating data into acoustics so that human ears can hear them.

However, we can now hear their melody, thanks to a composer who has turned them into sound.

Additional details
  • An illustration of a magnetar launching a FRB (Image credit: Robert Lea (created with Canva)) Back on Earth, an upcoming event at Oulu Cathedral offers a more immediate encounter with the bursts.
  • An animation shows the random appearance of fast radio bursts (FRBs) across the sky (Image credit: NRAO Outreach/T.
  • 21, 30 singers will stand among the audience and "sing back to the sky in Finnish" while Melchior plays the bursts live from a keyboard, he told Space.com by email.
  • Fast radio bursts, flashes of energy from faraway galaxies, are invisible to our eyes.
  • "The fast flashes will echo as snare-like beats bouncing through the cathedral," Masui said in a previous MIT statement.

How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →

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Space.comNovember 11, 2026, 9:00 PM UTC →

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