A decade ago, spurred by a question for a fifth-grade
science project, University of Washington physicist John Cramer devised an
audio recreation of the Big Bang that started our universe nearly 14 billion
years ago.
Now, armed with more sophisticated data from a satellite
mission observing the cosmic microwave background – a faint glow in the
universe that acts as sort of a fossilized fingerprint of the Big Bang – Cramer
has produced new recordings that fill in higher frequencies to create a fuller
and richer sound. (The sound files run from 20 seconds to a little longer than
8 minutes.)