Fiorella Terenzi's music Studio-cum-Cosmic Radio-Observatory is lined with a sophisticated combination of scientific computing equipment, electronic music synthesizers and composing workstations.

By remote control, via the Internet, she can control the antenna instruments at the huge Aricebo dish in Puerto Rico or the VLA, the Very Large antenna Array) in California. She can choose the area of the sky she wishes to see and the portion of the frequency spectrum she wishes to consider.

She is composing -- alternately searching the heavens with her telescope antenna and directing the signal to produce new sounds and rhythms on her computer-interfaced synthesizer equipment.

Her control is through her graphical computer workstations. Her visual feedback is through computer-generated, multi- dimensional images.

The sound is every bit as good as during her concert, but she is not satisfied -- she's getting frustrated.

Fiorella mumbles under her breath, "I've got to find it..." And initiates a picture-phone call to another scientist.

The scientist answers, "Hello?"

Fiorella gets down to business, "Hello, do you have an update on the superfluid computations?"

"No," the scientist replies, "It is still too early, we have not had time to take enough measurements. They must be spread over an entire year. It's only been sixty-four days."

"Thank you very much," Fiorella concludes, "Good-bye." She closes the call. She thinks to herself, "The cosmological origin -- I know the resonances will have perfect symmetry there. It will be so beautiful..."

Copyright 2000 Stewart Dickson and Rebecka Dickson