Longhorn Makes Waves with the First Photonic Guitar

Russell Stoneback, BS ’03, is an artist who turns deep-space physics into his own unique style of music and visuals. After a decade of lab work studying cosmic phenomena, he founded Cosmic Studio in Dallas and created a set of tools to animate the invisible behavior of plasma and electromagnetic fields. The results are vivid displays of the Earth’s swirling ionosphere, as well as the creation of the first photonic guitar, a new class of instrument that uses electromagnetic waves to create music.