Sarah Kane wanted to study space since she was a child. And she’s doing well. Now a senior undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, Kane has been using her machine learning to analyze the universe for the past two years. She has one small problem. Astronomy is a field of vision, and Kane is legally blind.
“You grow up and say, ‘How the hell are you going to be an astronomer? You can’t see stars if you can’t see through a telescope,'” Kane says. In the case of , astronomers are just doing data analysis on computers, and we can make computers accessible.”
To make their dreams come true, Kane and other budding researchers who are blind or visually impaired (BVI) are betting big on their efforts to turn scientific data into voice. At a conference held last December at the Lorenz Center in the Netherlands, a motley crew of scientists, sound engineers, and educators representing leaders in the emerging field of astroacousticization met to discuss current projects and what’s to come. showed the direction of Their research expands the accessibility of his BVI scientists to the next generation and is poised to create new ways to analyze the universe for all astronomers, sighted and her BVI alike. .
“The more blind people there are in astronomy, the more people like me are calling for these changes and improvements, and the snowballing effect we’ll see,” Kane says.
She experienced her first astrosonification during the early stages of the COVID pandemic when she advised a project called Atronify. The researchers played Kane with different chime-like sounds to determine which pitches and timbres best captured planetary transits. She likened the sound of this short passage to a short glissando on the piano. Overall, I found Kane to be a very intuitive experience.
Anita Zanella, an astronomer at the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics and one of the organizers of the December meeting, said: “We are basically blind to the sky.
Just as vivid pictures of galaxies from the world’s largest telescopes have inspired generations of sighted people, astronomical sonification has been used primarily for educational purposes. rice field.
According to Zanella, the conference was the first step in a larger journey towards standardization and expansion in the field. Like many largely grassroots efforts, Astronomical Sonification lacks a central organizational structure to formally track all of its various initiatives. One of the key tasks of the meeting was to look at the 100 or so existing projects to determine how much activity was going on. From there, the larger goal of developing a framework for sonifying data in both educational and research contexts could be achieved.
There is never a shortage of work to do. Currently, researchers cannot agree on even the most basic questions. Should we use lower or higher pitches to represent a very bright star? Would listeners be more receptive to the sounds of real instruments or computer synthesizers? Could sonification be a useful tool for serious astronomical research?
“Standardization is hard! There is no handbook that says ‘Do you want to sonify your data?’ Start here,” says Kimberly Arkand, a science communicator who sonifies data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
in search of standards
Sonification is not an entirely new scientific concept or tool. Think of the ominous click of Geiger’s counter, invented in 1908. This is a device that uses sound to track radiation levels. Astronomical sonification has also existed in various forms over the decades. Think, for example, of the metronome-like ticking of spiraling pulsars audible through radio telescopes, or of the recent “chirp” that marked the first direct detection of gravitational waves from a merging black hole in 2015. Please give me. What is new, however, is the growing awareness and sensitivity of astronomers to the needs of BVI researchers and laypersons.
Beyond accessibility issues, there are advantages to using sound rather than sight for scientific analysis. The human ear can detect invisible changes, and the ear is very good at filtering out noise. However, this does not mean that creating audio that inspires students or aids in astronomy research is easy. When British astronomer Chris Harrison created an audiovisual program to bring BVI children to a classroom in Newcastle, England, On the Solar System tour, he says, he used “cool, spacey sounds” to describe the solar system. flopped.
“We played them to some kids and they were like, ‘I don’t know what this is. says Harrison, an Academic Track Fellow at the University of Newcastle. “It did, and it was very well received. It’s clear to us that you need that dialogue.”
After an initial flop, the now revamped show has found success by combining visuals, narration, and sounding to render the solar system. As the planets and sun orbit the listener’s and viewer’s ‘heads’, each celestial body emerges with a different pitch and instrumentation that corresponds to its movement.
Harrison plans to use the open source code he created for the show as a template for other sonifications. He says the show’s feedback will inform potential frameworks.
“There are bar charts. There are scatter plots. “I think that’s our goal: to create a standard framework of things like ‘Sound mapping is done like this.'” you can make sensible choices. “
Rubén García Benito, astrophysicist at the Andalusian Institute of Astrophysics, says creating customizable tools that can adapt to the cultural background of the listener is very important for educators and scientists. increase. He uses the experience of two musician colleagues as an example. One was trained in European classical music, the other of him worked in traditional Persian music. Each musician found the music of the other region boring at first, but after listening to it more and more, they came to understand its value.
Astronomical sonification works as well, says Garcia Benito. Western audiences may experience a learning curve with sonifications that use Javanese gamelan sounds, for example, but a framework containing such options can be flexibly adapted to the needs of the data.
“We all live under the same sky,” he says. “If the universe is silent, then it is important that the cultural context that imprints the vocalization of astronomy is plural, and that it has many voices.”
clarion call
Kate Meredith, the self-proclaimed “den mother and grand secretary” of the field, has spent years organizing online panels on sonification and lobbying for more funding for research. I got
“It’s much easier to say, ‘We need a wheelchair-accessible telescope building,'” said president of Lake Geneva Astrophysics and STEAM (GLAS), a group dedicated to creating inclusive scientific practices. says Meredith. “But the reason [astronomical] Sonification is so new and poorly understood that it’s hard to get the first yes. “
Existing sonification projects can help secure funding and serve as proof of scientific utility. Because the human ear is so good at recognizing patterns, many sound-savvy astronomers take noisy data sets and use audio cues to sift through the garbage. Zanella’s future work will sharpen our perception of distant galaxies. In addition to capturing exoplanet transits with sound waves, researchers are experimenting with audible data for supernovae and other ephemeral cosmic events.
Pitch is often used as a variable to represent data because humans remember the relationship of pitch better than loudness or timbre. Meredith is optimistic about the future of astronomical sonification, but she says other guidelines must emerge to broaden the current educational focus and become a robust analytical tool.
“Standardization won’t happen until enough research is published,” she says. “We don’t just go and invent standards.
Sarah Kane, a legally blind young astronomer, is uniquely poised to take advantage of these new technologies. “I’m pretty optimistic [sonification’s] potential. I’m not so optimistic about timelines,” she says. “Grants move science. But I don’t think the slowness indicates sonification’s potential.”
That potential will be demonstrated later this year by Zanella and her colleagues transforming the Italian village of Castellaro Ragusero into an astronomical sound festival, with lectures and demonstrations for thousands of BVI individuals. She believes that events like this can inspire the next generation of scientists.
“I think there’s a very strong connection between being human and wondering about astronomy, what’s in the sky and how things are related,” she says. . “And there are so many incredible things in the sky. I think everyone should have access to that beauty.”
