Andrew Melchior
Oulu Cathedral
April 2026-April 2027
Oulu 2026
in association with
MIT Kavli Institute
Observed between 400 and 800 MHz
25 July 2018 - 15 Setember 2023
49.3208° N, 119.6239° W
A sound art work by Andrew Melchior
Fast Radio Bursts are millisecond-duration signals from deep space. They are among the most energetic events in the known universe.
Most have no confirmed origin.
Some bursts arrive once and never return. Others (known as repeaters) fire again and again from the same source, defying explanation and deepening the mystery of what is producing them.
The Logos makes them audible.
The Logos sits at the intersection of observational cosmology, contemporary sound art, and speculative philosophy. Timothy Morton's work on hyperobjects — entities so vast in time and space that they exceed human perception — provides the conceptual frame. Fast Radio Bursts are a living example: real, measurable, repeatable in aggregate but singular in instance, and fundamentally unresolved. They resist the categories we reach for. They are not messages.
They are not random. They are something we are still learning how to think about, and The Logos proposes that one way to think is to listen.
The Logos sonifies Fast Radio Burst data, preserving the structure of each signal in its translation from radio frequency to audible sound
We built instruments to detect what our bodies cannot. Radio telescopes such as CHIME in Canada receive signals that have crossed billions of light-years, compressing cosmic timescales into fractions of a second.
But detection is not the same as encounter. The Logos closes that gap, translating the structure of each burst from radio frequency into sound, so that what was merely data becomes something felt, something present in the room with you.
Oulu Cathedral, 2026
The Logos is installed at Oulu Cathedral, Finland, as part of the European Capital of Culture 2026 programme. The cathedral acts as both venue and instrument — its stone walls and resonant interior giving physical dimension to signals that have travelled further than anything else we have ever heard.
Audio System Inventory
12-channel spatial audio system (4.4.4)
Compute
1 × Apple Mac mini
1 × Dante Virtual Soundcard
Network
2 × Gigabit Ethernet switches
Cat6 Ethernet infrastructure
Dante I/O
12 × Dante AVIO analogue outputs
Loudspeakers
4 × Genelec 4040A
max SPL 112 dB
45 Hz – 20 kHz
dispersion 100° × 100°
4 × Genelec S360
max SPL 118 dB
36 Hz – 20 kHz
dispersion 95° × 75°
4 × Genelec 7382A
max SPL 130 dB
15 Hz – 100 Hz
dual 15″ drivers
Total loudspeakers: 12
Total LF drivers: 16
Total amplifier power: ≈ 4.5 kW
Maximum system output
≈ 136 dB peak (combined sub array)
System frequency range
15 Hz – 20 kHz
Effective spatial coverage
≈ 100° horizontal × 100° vertical (height layer)
≈ 95° horizontal × 75° vertical (main layer)
Spatial format
4.4.4 immersive array
Network audio protocol
Dante
The LOGOS Data
Catalogs
Catalog 1 — published June 2021
- 536 FRBs detected between 25 July 2018 – 1 July 2019
- 62 bursts from 18 known repeating sources
- Observed between 400 and 800 MHz
- First large uniform-selection-effect catalog from a single survey
Catalog 1 — Baseband Update — published October 2023
- Updated results for 140 of the original 536 FRBs for which raw voltage ("baseband") data were available
- Provided sub-arcminute localisation, ~10% flux/fluence uncertainty, three orders of magnitude better time resolution, and polarization data for all 140 events
Catalog 2 — published 14 January 2026
- 4,539 FRBs observed between 25 July 2018 – 15 September 2023
- From 3,641 unique sources, including 981 bursts from 83 known repeating sources
- 400–800 MHz at 0.983 ms resolution
- Includes all Catalog 1 events reprocessed under an improved uniform analysis framework
- 8.5× increase over Catalog 1
- 3,558 non-repeating sources and 83 repeating sources
What
The Logos is a collaboration between artist Andrew Melchior, astrophysicist Kiyoshi Masui, philosopher Timothy Morton and theologian Satu Saarinen. Working with real-time and archival data from the CHIME radio telescope in British Columbia, the project sonifies Fast Radio Bursts — preserving their temporal structure, spectral shape, and energy distribution in the translation from the electromagnetic to the acoustic.
The software engineering, synthesiser design and spatial audio integration for The Logos is created by Oliver Larkin.
The result is not music. It is not illustration. It is the faithful rendering of something the cosmos is doing that we have not yet fully explained.
An Exploration
Youngest burst (nearest source / shortest travel time)
FRB 20200120E has the lowest reported dispersion measure of any FRB at 87.82 pc cm⁻³, and has been associated with a globular cluster in the M81 galaxy system at a distance of 3.6 Mpc — roughly 12 million light-years. Detected by CHIME. That signal travelled ~12 million years to reach us. It's also the nearest extragalactic FRB, approximately 40 times closer than the next closest.
Oldest burst (most distant source / longest travel time)
The all-time record holder is FRB 20220610A, detected by ASKAP (not CHIME) in June 2022. It was localized to a morphologically complex host galaxy system at redshift 1.016 ± 0.002 — meaning the burst was emitted more than 8 billion years ago, when the universe was less than half its present age.