Can you hear an ocean or a river? For some NASA scientists, the answer is yes. They transformed the colors of the Río de la Plata into musical notes and created a melody. Want to know what the Río de la Plata sounds like? We’ll tell you
From pixels to notes
The project is called “Sounds of the Ocean” and was developed between 2020 and 2021, when Ryan Vandermeulen, a scientist working at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, developed—together with his brother, who has musical experience—a system that mathematically translated the colors of the ocean into musical notes, based on a photo taken in 2025 of the Río de la Plata estuary.
The sound of the Río de la Plata is not well known; it is a unique and unrepeatable sound that comes from the river itself, and you can listen to it here.
Vandermeulen extracted patterns from the red, green, and blue channels of the image and assigned them musical values.
What the colors of the Río de la Plata sound like
The Río de la Plata estuary, which separates Argentina from Uruguay at the confluence of the Uruguay and Paraná rivers, has a very distinctive brown color. But when its waters mix with the Atlantic, microscopic phytoplankton appear, coloring the ocean green and blue.
