TIME LOST:

Sónar celebrates its 25th anniversary by sending a message in search of extraterrestrial intelligence

Sónar is a music, creativity and technology festival that has been held in Barcelona since 1994. For the last 24 years Sónar Festival has been scouring the Earth to uncover the most advanced sounds on the planet. To celebrate its 25 years, Sónar has decided to redirect its antenna and send/transmit music into space, with the objective of making first contact with intelligent life not of this world.

In collaboration with the Catalonia Institute of Space Studiesand METI International, 36 music pieces will be sent to Luyten’s Star b (GJ 273b), a potentially habitable exoplanet located 12.4 light years from Earth. This means that within 25 years we could receive a response from an extra-terrestrial civilization.

Six transmissions – each transmission will send six ten second musical pieces – sent from the EISCAT facilities in Tromso, Norway, using a radio frequency antenna. Due to strong signal degradation in interstellar communication the message will be encoded to 8 bits PCM and to a frequency of 6.4 kHz.