Christine Malec, who has been blind since birth, has always been a big astronomy buff, fascinated by major questions about the universe like what happens when a limit reaches infinity and whether things like space travel could one day become a reality. However, throughout her childhood, most astronomical information was only accessible to her via space documentaries or science fiction books.
Nearly a decade ago, Malec discovered a completely new way to experience astronomy when she saw astronomer and musician Matt Russo, Ph.D., give a presentation at a local planetarium in Toronto. Using a process called astronomical sonification, Russo had translated information collected from the TRAPPIST-1 solar system, which has seven planets locked in an orbital resonance, into something people who are blind or have low vision could experience: music.
Russo’s song sent a wave of goosebumps through Malec’s body. Something she had previously understood intellectually but never had turned into a sensory experience was suddenly, profoundly felt.
“It was unforgettable,” Malec told Salon in a phone interview. “I compare it to what it might be like for a sighted person to look up at the night sky and get a sensory intuition of the size and nature of the cosmos. As a blind person, that’s an experience I hadn’t had.”
Through astronomical sonification, scientists map complex astronomical structures like black holes or exploded stars through the similarly expansive and multidimensional world of sound. Translating data from outer space into music not only expands access to astronomy for people who are blind or have low vision, but it also has the potential to help all scientists better understand the universe by leading to novel discoveries. Like images from the James Webb telescope that contextualize our tiny place in the universe, astronomical sonification similarly holds the power to connect listeners to the cosmos.
Like images from the James Webb telescope that contextualize our tiny place in the universe, astronomical sonification similarly holds the power to connect listeners to the cosmos.
“It really does bring a connection that you don't necessarily get when you're just looking at a cluster of galaxies that's billions of light years away from you that stretches across many hundreds of millions of light years,” said Kimberly Kowal Arcand, Ph.D., a data visualizer for NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. “Having sound as a way of experiencing that type of phenomenon, that type of object, whatever it is, is a very valid way of experiencing the world around you and of making meaning.”
Malec serves as a consultant for Chandra Sonifications, which translates complex data from astronomical objects into sound. One of their most popular productions, which has been listened to millions of times, sonified a black hole in the Perseus cluster galaxy about 240 million light-years away. When presenting this sonification at this year’s SXSW festival in March, Russo, who works with Chandra through an organization he founded called SYSTEM Sounds, said this eerie sound used to depict the black hole had been likened to “millions of damned souls being sucked into the pits of hell.”
Russo told Salon in a phone interview that, growing up, he always saw his scientific and artistic sides in conflict with one another. But as he was finishing his postdoc studies, NASA discovered the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system, and he immediately saw its potential as the most musical solar system ever found, he said.
“You can speed up [the planets’] motion and hear their orbits as a fixed repeating rhythm, and if you speed it up even further, you can associate their motion with musical pitches,” Russo told Salon in a phone interview. “In this system, the planets are essentially tuned to each other in musical harmony.”
Though the process differs slightly depending on each project, the team at Chandra usually uses Python to create a mathematical map of the data, inputs that into music software and then fine-tunes it, Arcand said. Some projects have more artistic elements that the musicians decide to incorporate, while others are more data-driven. Regardless, the team works with consultants like Malec who are blind or have low vision throughout the process to make sure that what they’re mapping is clear, harmonious and makes sense.
Astronomical sonification has the potential to change how astronomers approach their studies, allowing them to view data more creatively and potentially explore the universe more deeply.
When transforming a portrait of the Pillars of Creation, a region of intense star formation, the team converted the tall pillars of gas and dust where baby stars are born into a sort of roaring, foundational hum that communicated their shape and structure. Young, energetic stars that lie around these pillars emit lots of X-ray data in what Arcand likened to having “temper tantrums.” These young stars were given a short “burpee” kind of sound to capture this behavior, she explained.
“The end result needs to be something that's distinct and clear that has those moments of either harmony or coalescence where the sounds really work together but also are very clear on their own,” Arcand said.
Astronomical sonification has the potential to change how astronomers approach their studies, allowing them to view data more creatively and potentially explore the universe more deeply, Arcand said.
“There are moments in a two-dimensional image that I never noticed when I was just looking at it as an image because there's so much data that I'm looking at all at one time,” Arcand said. “But when you're listening to the data, you're listening to it over time … It helps my brain focus and slow down to notice those kinds of temporal aspects.”
William “Bill” Kurth, Ph.D., a space physicist at the University of Iowa, said the origins of astronomical sonification can be traced back to at least the 1970s when the Voyager-1 spacecraft recorded electromagnetic wave signals in space that were sent back down to his team on Earth, where they were processed as audio recordings.
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Back in 1979, the team plotted the recordings on a frequency-time spectrogram similar to a voiceprint you see on apps that chart sounds like birds chirping, Kurth explained. The sounds emitted a "whistling" effect created by waves following the magnetic fields of the planet rather than going in straight lines. The data seemed to confirm what they had suspected: lightning was shocking through Jupiter’s atmosphere.
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“At that time, the existence of lightning anywhere other than in Earth's atmosphere was unknown,” Kurth told Salon in a phone interview. “This became the first time that we realized that lightning might exist on another planet.”
Beyond astronomy, sonification can be applied to any of the sciences, and health researchers are currently looking at tonifying DNA strands to better understand how proteins fold in multiple dimensions. Chandra is also working on constructing tactile 3-D models of astronomical phenomena, which also expands access for people who are blind or have low vision — those who have historically only been able to experience these sciences through words, Malec said.
“As a blind person, your experience of the world is often linear, in that you can't walk into a space and make a survey and take it all in at once,” Malec explained. “When I touch these [astronomical objects], it’s like a window into the universe, which is I guess how sighted people experience pictures."
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