For astronomers who are sighted, the Universe is full of visual wonders. From shimmering planets to sparkling galaxies, the cosmos is spectacularly beautiful. But those who are blind or visually impaired cannot share that experience. So astronomers have been developing alternative ways to convey scientific information, such as using 3D printing to represent exploding stars, and sound to describe the collision of neutron stars.
On Friday, the journal Nature Astronomy will publish the latest in a series of articles on the use of sonification in astronomy Sonification describes the conversion of data (including research data) into digital audio files, which allows them to be heard, as well as read and seen. The researchers featured in Nature Astronomy show that sound representations can help scientists to better identify patterns or signals in large astronomical data The work demonstrates that efforts to boost inclusivity and accessibility can have wider benefits. This is true not only in astronomy; sonification has also yielded discoveries in other fields that might otherwise not have been made. Research funders and publishers need to take note, and support interdisciplinary efforts that are simultaneously more innovative and inclusive number of sonification projects picked up around a decade ago, drawing in researchers from a range of backgrounds. Take Kimberly Arcand, a data-visualization expert and science communicator at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Arcand began by writing and speaking about astronomy, particularly discoveries coming from NASA’s orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory. She then moved on to work that centred on the sense of touch; this included making 3D printed models of the ‘leftovers’ of exploded stars that conveyed details of the physics of these stellar explosions. When, in early 2020, the pandemic meant she was unable to get to a 3D printer, she shifted to working on sonification.
In August, NASA tweeted about the sound of the black hole at the centre of the Perseus galaxy cluster; the attached file has since been played more than 17 million times. In the same month, Arcand and others converted some of the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope into sound. They worked under the guidance of people who are blind and visually impaired to map the intensity and colours of light in the headline-grabbing pictures into audio these maps are grounded in technical accuracy. The sonification of an image of gas and dust in a distant nebula, for instance, uses loud high-frequency sounds to represent bright light near the top of the image, but lower-frequency loud sounds to represent bright light near the image’s centre. The black hole sonification translates data on sound waves travelling through space — created by the black hole’s impact on the hot gas that surrounds it — into the range of human hearing.
Scientists in other fields have also experimented with data sonification. Biophysicists have used it to help students understand protein folding5. Aspects of proteins are matched to sound parameters such as loudness and pitch, which are then combined into an audio representation of the complex folding process. Neuroscientists have explored whether it can help with the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease from brain scans6. Sound has even been used to describe ecological shifts caused by climate change in an Alaskan forest, with researchers assigning various musical instruments to different tree species
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