Twelve Times Slower

One piece, one frame, four million pixels — and an accident we kept. The traversal was asked for two minutes of audio from a NIRCam frame 2048 pixels square. A frame that size cannot be walked at sixty frames a second, so the recorder kept running while the traversal crawled, about twelve times slower than real time, until the process was stopped from outside. What you hear is a two-minute piece stretched by its own arithmetic to twenty-five. Nothing was time-stretched afterwards. The clock was simply outrun, and the sound of that is a very slow just-intoned drone moving through a field it will never finish crossing. Source data: public JWST observations obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) at the Space Telescope Science Institute, operated by AURA under NASA contract NAS 5-03127. Programs #1191, #1257, #1328, #1621, #2457, #2484, #2727, #2731, #2732, #2733, #2736, #2926, #4426, #4523, #4528, #5086, #5883. We acknowledge the teams led by Lee Armus (#1328) and Roberto Maiolino (#4426) for developing their observing programs with a zero-exclusive-access period. Observation identifiers are given above. Audio © 2026 Far Wide Radio — licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. All artwork by Elliot Fairbanks Junior. Archived and citable: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21693766 Series 2 contains material from the DESI Early Data Release (DESI Collaboration et al. 2024), used under CC BY 4.0. Full citation, acknowledgement and data credits: radio.enthropysystems.com/pages/attribution Series 2 is archived and citable: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21995512