Far Wide Radio

The one that should have been caught earlier. An instrument does not see a rectangle. It sees a tilted patch inside one, and reflecting the frame about its diagonal moves that patch — so every pixel the telescope covered on one side of the mirror and not the other is subtracted against nothing and comes back at full strength. Across sixty-four cubes, that edge is most of what this technique was reporting. On the worst of them it is 99.6% of it. The first movement is one such cube with the edge left in. The second is the same cube, at the same scale and the same gain, with those pixels removed. It runs three minutes and twenty seconds and it is silent from end to end. That is the finding, not a fault: nothing that cube was telling us survived the removal of the telescope’s own shape. The third movement is that silent piece again on its own scale, so you can hear that something is there — about forty decibels below what the first movement was calling the sky. Then an Einstein ring, twice, the same way. Source: JWST MIRI and NIRSpec IFU, programs 2926 and 5883. A note on the silences: this piece runs quiet for 6m58s in total, the longest stretch 3m24s. Nothing is wrong with the file. The silence is the recording. Each piece here is a subtraction: two files put on one scale and taken away from each other, with agreement rendered as silence. Where you hear nothing, the two files agreed. 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

Five spectral cubes, where time runs along the spectrum. These are not photographs. Each is a stack of thousands of images of the same patch of sky, one for every colour the instrument can separate. The subtraction is the same as in episode one, but the scan now moves along the colour axis, so travelling through a piece is travelling through the spectrum. What you are listening for is where in that spectrum a field stops being its own mirror. A protostellar jet, a lensed arc, a quasar host, an edge-on disc, and the core of a ring galaxy. One gain across all five, so the quieter pieces are the cubes that kept more of themselves. The ring galaxy comes in roughly twenty decibels below the jet, and that ordering is not brightness. A sixth cube was rendered for this programme and left out of it: it comes back silent under every scale the instrument offers, because its residual lives in a handful of pixels and this mapping listens to averages. A mapping’s blind spot is a fact for the notebook rather than a movement. Source: JWST NIRSpec IFU, programs 1257, 2484, 2457, 1621 and 2727. A note on the silences: this piece runs quiet for 4m31s in total, the longest stretch 2m24s. Nothing is wrong with the file. The silence is the recording. Each piece here is a subtraction: two files put on one scale and taken away from each other, with agreement rendered as silence. Where you hear nothing, the two files agreed. 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

Titan, four filters, and a listening test. One target, one detector, one subarray, one scoring, one scale, one gain. The only thing that varies across these four movements is the colour of the light — and how much of the field survived being subtracted from its own reflection. A moon is a disc, and a disc in the middle of a frame is very nearly its own mirror image. At 1.87 and 2.12 microns the disc carries the frame and the movement is quiet. At 3.0 and 4.66 microns it does not, and the movement is about fourteen decibels louder. Set the volume once and leave it. That fourteen decibels is the measurement, not a mixing decision, and adjusting between movements erases the only thing this programme is for. Source: JWST NIRCam, program 4523 (Titan surface and atmosphere). A note on the silences: this piece runs quiet for 6m59s in total, the longest stretch 1m51s. Nothing is wrong with the file. The silence is the recording. Each piece here is a subtraction: two files put on one scale and taken away from each other, with agreement rendered as silence. Where you hear nothing, the two files agreed. 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

Five photographs of the sky, each subtracted from its own reflection. Reflect a frame about the diagonal that runs from one corner to the other, and subtract the reflection from the original. Wherever the mirror gave the field back exactly, the two cancel and nothing sounds. Everything you hear is what it failed to return. The series is named for the part you cannot hear. The Cosmic Cliffs first, then a planetary nebula that really is round and is audibly quieter for it, then five galaxies scattered off the diagonal that never stop, then the first deep field, then one very large mosaic. Four of the five are as far from symmetric as a random field would be. Knowing that ordinary case is ordinary took eighty-nine measurements before a note was rendered. Source: JWST NIRCam imaging, Early Release Observations (programs 2731, 2732, 2733, 2736) and program 1328. 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

A NIRCam frame minus its own transpose, read across the detector. Silence would mean a perfectly symmetric field. What sounds is the asymmetry, and nothing else. Choir and timpani. 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

Discrete notes instead of continuous sound: one scale degree per frame, repeats merged, so a note sounds only when the data moves. This is the edge-activity face of the cube, on marimba, in D Dorian. Rendered identically but driven by brightness, the same three minutes plays a third as many notes. The choice of which feature drives pitch turns out to matter far more than the choice of scale, and this is what that sounds like. 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

Brightness bands read through real bell partials — inharmonic, the way a bell actually rings — where the contrast of a band chooses the size of the bell that sounds it. Twelve distinct pitches in three and a half minutes: the sparsest and most physical thing in the collection. Shell changes ring rather than step. 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

The repaired mapping, alone. Pitch here is driven by edge activity — a channel that survives having the cube shuffled — rather than by brightness, which does not. It is the first melody this instrument has produced that a control cannot reproduce, and the whole of Series 2 is arranged around getting to it. Whole-tone tuning, so the scale samples pitch as evenly as twelve tones allow and the data’s own movement is quantised as little as possible. 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

The same cube minus itself, shifted eight slices along the wavelength axis. The residual is how fast the cube changes with wavelength: this is the only piece in the collection that sonifies a rate of change rather than a value. Oboe and bassoon, and long stretches where the cube is changing so smoothly that nothing sounds at all. A note on the silences: this piece runs quiet for 1m37s in total, the longest stretch 56 seconds. Nothing is wrong with the file. The silence is the recording, and here it carries a specific meaning. These pieces are subtractions: two files put on one shared scale and taken away from each other, with agreement rendered as silence. Where you hear nothing, the two files agreed. Nothing is wrong with the download. 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

A spectral cube minus a three-by-three median filter of itself. A median filter eats single-pixel spikes, so what is left over is the detector talking about itself: hot pixels, cosmic ray hits, bad samples. Each note is one defect. Music box and timpani. Half of it is silence, because most of the detector is behaving. A note on the silences: this piece runs quiet for 55 seconds in total, the longest stretch 55 seconds. Nothing is wrong with the file. The silence is the recording, and here it carries a specific meaning. These pieces are subtractions: two files put on one shared scale and taken away from each other, with agreement rendered as silence. Where you hear nothing, the two files agreed. Nothing is wrong with the download. 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

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

Twelve subtractions. Nothing here is a rendering of data. Two files are put on one shared scale and taken away from each other, and the residual is sonified so that agreement is silence and only disagreement sounds. The sign splits between two voices, one panned to each side. A cube minus a blur of itself is its own fine structure. A cube minus a median of itself is the detector’s defects — hot pixels, cosmic ray hits, single bad samples. A cube minus a surrogate that kept its Fourier amplitudes and threw away its phase is whatever shape survives that operation. A field minus its own mirror image is its asymmetry. Of every instrument in this collection this is the only one where not hearing something is evidence. Roughly a quarter of this programme is silence, and the silence is the recording. A note on the silences: this piece runs quiet for 10m36s in total, the longest stretch 2m02s. Nothing is wrong with the file. The silence is the recording, and here it carries a specific meaning. These pieces are subtractions: two files put on one shared scale and taken away from each other, with agreement rendered as silence. Where you hear nothing, the two files agreed. Nothing is wrong with the download. This programme contains material from the DESI Early Data Release (DESI Collaboration et al. 2024), used under CC BY 4.0. Required citation and the full acknowledgement: https://radio.enthropysystems.com/pages/attribution 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

The programme where the instrument is caught, and then repaired. Twice here a piece is followed by its ghost: the same render, made the same way, from the same cube after every value in it was shuffled into a random position. They are very hard to tell apart. That is the finding rather than a lapse of attention — measured, the feature driving pitch is statistically indistinguishable between the real cube and the shuffle. Then the mapping is changed. Pitch is driven by edge activity, a channel that does survive shuffling, instead of by brightness, which does not. The ghost stops matching: the real cube’s line covers twice the pitch range of its control. Near the end, two recordings with the view deliberately frozen, so you can hear how little the bands move on their own. That is what established the accurate version of the finding: the melody was reporting that the view changed, and could not report what changed. This programme contains material from the DESI Early Data Release (DESI Collaboration et al. 2024), used under CC BY 4.0. Required citation and the full acknowledgement: https://radio.enthropysystems.com/pages/attribution 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

Thirteen readings of the same instruction, forty-two minutes long. Each view of a data cube is quantised into eight brightness bands. The piece steps through those bands while the view itself advances in depth, weighted so that depth carrying more structure takes more time. That instruction never changes here. What changes is the tuning it lands on: struck gamelan bronze, real bell partials where the contrast of a band picks the size of the bell, quarter tones, a raga over a fixed drone, a just-intoned overtone series. Two sources. A quasar host observed by JWST’s NIRSpec, and a slice of the DESI redshift survey. Listen for the terraces, and for how differently they arrive when the scale underneath them changes. The next programme is about what those terraces are actually reporting. This programme contains material from the DESI Early Data Release (DESI Collaboration et al. 2024), used under CC BY 4.0. Required citation and the full acknowledgement: https://radio.enthropysystems.com/pages/attribution 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

The last of the Field Series: jw05086, first observation, NIRSpec G235H with F170LP — the same instrument configuration as Episode 7, a different programme and a different piece of sky. Fourteen minutes of the most distinctive passages, ninety-three minutes of the open field running brightness, obstruction, gradient and into lines, and seven minutes of the fifty rarest to finish. This cube is led by its spectral lines. More than a quarter of the distinctive suite comes from the line reading — continuum-subtracted brightness, where only the emission and absorption features remain — with raw brightness behind it. Flow is effectively absent, a single passage in a hundred, and contributes nothing to the rare suite. What is rare here is obstruction and anisotropy: disagreement between neighbouring spectra, and structure that runs one way rather than another. Before Birth is an acknowledged test series. 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

jw04528 through NIRSpec’s G395H grating with F290LP — the longest wavelengths and highest resolution the instrument offers, the far end of its near-infrared reach. Fourteen minutes of the most distinctive passages, ninety-three minutes of the open field, seven minutes of the rarest. This is the most sharply divided cube in the series. A quarter of its distinctive suite is plain brightness — more than any other field here — so the opening is the most straightforwardly luminous fourteen minutes in the ten. Then the close inverts it: exactly half the rare suite comes from holonomy, the round-trip curl of the Doppler field, and a further quarter from flow. Almost nothing that is rare in this cube is rare because of how bright it is. The piece begins in intensity and ends in geometry. Before Birth is an acknowledged test series. 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

jw04426 again, third observation, this time G140M with F100LP — the shortest wavelengths NIRSpec’s medium-resolution gratings reach, on the same field Episode 10 reads further into the infrared. Three movements as before: the hundred most distinctive passages over fourteen minutes, the open field for ninety-three, the fifty rarest over seven. The shift down in wavelength shows. Lines, brightness and gradient are near level at the top of the distinctive suite — three readings that all respond to spectral features directly — while holonomy, which was second in Episode 10, collapses to three passages out of a hundred. The rare suite follows the same logic: gradient first, lines second, and material drawn from all seven readings rather than piled into one. Two exposures of one field, and the grating decides what the field is made of. Before Birth is an acknowledged test series. 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

jw04426, first observation, NIRSpec G235M with F170LP — the medium-resolution grating over the same wavelength range that the high-resolution G235H covers in Episodes 7 and 13. Coarser sampling, wider coverage per exposure. Fourteen minutes of the hundred most distinctive passages, ninety-three minutes of the open field at twenty-four minutes per reading, seven minutes of the fifty rarest. Holonomy is unusually prominent here — the plaquette round-trip of the Doppler field, nonzero only where the shift field cannot be integrated consistently — and it sits second in the distinctive suite behind plain brightness. The rare suite swings elsewhere entirely: nearly two in five of its passages come from obstruction, spectra arguing with their neighbours. Its companion, the same programme at shorter wavelengths, is Episode 11. Before Birth is an acknowledged test series. 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

The other half of the pair. Same JWST programme, same MIRI channel, second observation, one sub-band longer — jw02926-o002 where Episode 8 was o001. If the series has a controlled comparison in it, this is that comparison. The build is identical: fourteen minutes of the hundred most distinctive passages, ninety-three minutes of the open field running brightness, obstruction, gradient and into lines, seven minutes of the fifty rarest. What changed with the sub-band: brightness still leads the distinctive suite, but flow and anisotropy have climbed to join it, and the line reading has almost vanished from the rare suite — one passage out of fifty, against nine in the short-band cube. The rare material here is spread across all seven readings rather than concentrated. The same sky, moved slightly along in wavelength, does not sound like the same data. Before Birth is an acknowledged test series. 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

jw02926, first observation, through MIRI’s first spectrometer channel at its short sub-band — the shortest wavelengths the mid-infrared spectrometer covers, and its narrowest field of view. Fourteen minutes of the hundred most distinctive passages; ninety-three minutes of the open field, twenty-four minutes to each reading; seven minutes of the fifty rarest to close. This cube is legible. Its distinctive suite is led by the plainest readings available — raw brightness, gradient, obstruction, lines, in that order — and its rare suite is led by brightness too, which is unusual: rarity here comes from intensity itself doing something odd, not from the more exotic derived fields. Holonomy barely registers, and the anisotropy reading contributes nothing rare at all. Its sibling, the same programme one sub-band up, is Episode 9. Before Birth is an acknowledged test series. 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

The odd one in the series, and worth knowing why. The cube is jw02457-o054 through NIRSpec’s G235H grating with F170LP — the same observation Episode 2 reads five times. Here the motif finder was pointed not at the engine’s mode renders but at the desk passes themselves, so the passages in this programme are labelled by which pass they came from rather than by which property was being sonified. Fourteen minutes of the ninety-seven most distinctive passages open it. Ninety-three minutes of the open field follow, brightness through the start of the line reading. The seven-minute rare suite closes, and its fifty passages are unevenly sourced: a third come from one pass alone, and one pass contributes a single passage. A high-resolution grating and a cube that has already been listened to more than any other on this album. Before Birth is an acknowledged test series. 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

jw01621, exposure 00005, as it came off NIRSpec’s first detector. This one is named for hardware rather than for a grating: it is a detector-level product, the rawest-labelled cube in the series. The programme runs the standard three movements — a fourteen-minute suite of the hundred most distinctive passages, ninety-three minutes of the open field at twenty-four minutes per reading, and a seven-minute close of the fifty rarest. Its signature is obstruction. More than a fifth of the distinctive suite comes from that reading — the measure of how much each cell’s spectrum disagrees with its four neighbours — which is a way of saying this field is structurally disputed with itself more than most. The rare suite is one of the few here that draws on all seven readings, with the line reading heaviest. Before Birth is an acknowledged test series. A note on the silences: this piece runs quiet for 48m08s in total, the longest stretch 12m24s. Nothing is wrong with the file. The silence is the recording. This is a translation of a JWST spectral cube — the engine sounds what the data does, not a continuous signal — so where the cube has nothing to report, nothing sounds. These recur about every 24 minutes — once per traversal pass across the same empty band. 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

The one mid-infrared cube in the first half of the Field Series: jw01328-o010, read by MIRI’s third spectrometer channel at its medium setting — much longer wavelengths than anything NIRSpec returns, and a much smaller field. Same three-part shape as the rest of the series. Fourteen minutes of the hundred most distinctive passages; ninety-three minutes of the open field, running brightness, obstruction, gradient and the beginning of the line reading at twenty-four minutes each; then seven minutes of the fifty rarest. This is the most evenly spread cube in the series — no single reading dominates its distinctive suite, though flow and lines edge ahead. Its rare suite tips the other way: nearly two in five of those passages come from the gradient reading, the derivative of intensity along wavelength, which is where spectral lines register as events rather than as tone. Before Birth is an acknowledged test series. 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

One JWST observation, put through the motif instrument three ways. The cube is jw01191-o017, taken with NIRSpec’s prism — the widest and coarsest setting the instrument has, the whole near-infrared in one low-resolution sweep. First, fourteen minutes of about ninety-five passages the finder judged distinctive: shapes rare enough to stand out that nonetheless recur. Then ninety-three minutes of the open field, where each reading of the cube runs twenty-four minutes in turn — brightness, then obstruction, then gradient, then some twenty minutes into the line reading before the piece moves on. Last, seven minutes of fifty passages ranked by how few times their shape occurs anywhere in the cube. What this cube gave up: its distinctive material leans hard on flow and holonomy — apparent source velocity, and the round-trip curl of the Doppler field. Its rare suite contains no brightness passages at all. Before Birth is an acknowledged test series. A note on the silences: this piece runs quiet for 22m41s in total, the longest stretch 4m29s. Nothing is wrong with the file. The silence is the recording. This is a translation of a JWST spectral cube — the engine sounds what the data does, not a continuous signal — so where the cube has nothing to report, nothing sounds. These recur about every 4 minutes — once per traversal pass across the same empty band. 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

The produced side of the reservoir — ten studio passes and machine improvisations, sequenced to arrive the way weather does. It opens on a desk render whose session name, A King of Spades Delta 1, records nothing about the sound; underneath it is an equalised mix of three brightness-shell stems taken from the 1191 prism cube. Then forty-four minutes of contourclean, which is all seven engine readings of the 2457 cube — brightness, obstruction, gradient, lines, flow, holonomy, anisotropy — sounding at once instead of in turn. The middle is a decomposition. A persistent-component walk over one cube was exported as stems: components one to four enter in order, each covering barely one percent of the frame, then the residual, which covers half of it — the part no component explains. Twenty-eight minutes of Mercury24-1 layers those same seven readings across four different cubes simultaneously. Two renders of the shell stems close. Before Birth is an acknowledged test series. 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

One observation, read five times. The cube is jw02457-o054 — a NIRSpec pointing through the G235H grating and the F170LP filter. It was worked five separate times at the desk; the five renders are trimmed to twenty-three minutes each and played in order. The bench does not move between them. Image row becomes pitch, column becomes stereo position, wavelength becomes time. So the cloud is fixed, and what differs from pass to pass is the handling — which was never written down anywhere except in the audio itself. Measured before mastering, this is the flattest thing on the album: a loudness range of under 3 LU across nearly two hours. It holds one level and asks to be heard into rather than across. The same cube is read a second and unrelated way in Episode 7. Before Birth is an acknowledged test series. 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

A descent through JWST spectral cubes, an hour and fifty-five minutes long. The piece opens and closes on the same figure: a fall through the depth of a cube. Wavelength is read as time, so the descent is not a metaphor for moving through a spectrum — it is the move, at the speed the data allows. Between those two passes sit twenty-eight minutes of quasar material and another forty-six of its slower glow; a run of motifs chosen for how rarely their structure recurs; and two fields read directly — field 1191 through NIRSpec’s prism, field 1328 through MIRI’s third channel. None of it is illustration. Image row becomes pitch, column becomes stereo position, wavelength becomes time. What changes between movements is which property of the data is driving the sound. Before Birth is the first Far Wide Radio series, and openly a test: long-form, unhurried, and in places very quiet. 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