from the oh-scientist,-what-big-ears-you-have dept.
“NASA produces a vast amount of data from its satellites. Exploring such large quantities of data can be difficult,” said Alexander. "Sonification offers a promising supplement to standard visual analysis techniques.” But one clever idea is to turn the measurements of space into sound and speed it up; a month of data might be scanned audibly in all of 10 minutes.
Alexander is a PhD candidate in design science at the University of Michigan. He is a sonification specialist who trains heliophysicists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, to pick out subtle differences by listening to satellite data instead of looking at it.
Sonification is the process of displaying any type of data or measurement as sound, such as the beep from a heart rate monitor measuring a person’s pulse, a door bell ringing every time a person enters a room, or, in this case, explosions indicating large events occurring on the sun. In certain cases, scientists can use their ears instead of their eyes to process data more rapidly -- and to detect more details – than through visual analysis. A paper on the effectiveness of sonification in analyzing data from NASA satellites was published in the July issue of Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics.
http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/more-than-meets-the-eye-nasa-scientists-listen-to-data/
[Abstract]: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014JA020025/abstract
[Additional Coverage]: http://gizmodo.com/nasa-scans-through-vast-amounts-of-data-by-converting-i-1630766384
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We're all familiar with the elements of the periodic table, but have you ever wondered what hydrogen or zinc, for example, might sound like? W. Walker Smith, now a graduate student at Indiana University, combined his twin passions of chemistry and music to create what he calls a new audio-visual instrument to communicate the concepts of chemical spectroscopy.
Smith presented his data sonification project—which essentially transforms the visible spectra of the elements of the periodic table into sound—at a meeting of the American Chemical Society being held this week in Indianapolis, Indiana. Smith even featured audio clips of some of the elements, along with "compositions" featuring larger molecules, during a performance of his "The Sound of Molecules" show.
As an undergraduate, "I [earned] a dual degree in music composition and chemistry, so I was always looking for a way to turn my chemistry research into music," Smith said during a media briefing.
[...]
Data sonification is not a new concept. For instance, in 2018, scientists transformed NASA's image of Mars rover Opportunity on its 5,000th sunrise on Mars into music. The particle physics data used to discover the Higgs boson, the echoes of a black hole as it devoured a star, and magnetometer readings from the Voyager mission have also been transposed into music. And several years ago, a project called LHCSound built a library of the "sounds" of a top quark jet and the Higgs boson, among others. The project hoped to develop sonification as a technique for analyzing the data from particle collisions so that physicists could "detect" subatomic particles by ear.
Related:
Scientists Are Turning Data Into Sound to Listen to the Whispers of the Universe (and More) (Aug. 2022)
How one Astronomer Hears the Universe (Jan. 2020)
The Bird's Ear View of Space Physics: NASA Scientists Listen to Data (Sept. 2014)
(Score: 2) by chromas on Sunday September 07 2014, @09:06PM
If you play it fast enough then you'll discover the seismic event is actually an alien sub with a magneto vacuudynamic drive.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Monday September 08 2014, @03:45AM
We humans subconsciously do a helluva lot of audio processing without even thinking about it. Its how we can talk in a noisy room, or follow the music.
How many of us have known mechanics who know what's wrong with a car just by hearing it run? I have known quite a few.
I knew one old guy at the refinery who could just walk around the plant and could tell you just by the sound of everything if something was fixing to fail.
Before I left the refinery, I remember them getting all sorts of spectrum analyzers and software guys trying to recreate what that old guy did. I do not think they ever got as accurate as he was. To him, the refinery was like a giant orchestra, and if anyone played a sour note, he was on it.
Even in the early days of computing, I knew enough to couple a set of headphones through an amplifier and listen to the data and address lines of my early machines. They each had a distinctive sound when the machine was running normally. I could often tell which routines the machine was running by the sound it made on a particular line.... well what I interpreted as a sound. The old PDP even radiated so much EMI you could hear it on an AM radio between stations.
I worked on one project at an aerospace company where we were listening to audio of submarines. Many of the guys there could identify each submarine by simply hearing it - but then a lot of us can correctly identify a musical instrument or motorcycle by hearing it as well.
I have adapted a lot of my stuff to output audio tones when I am using it for calibrations - so I can hook up, calibrate, and go to the next without ever taking my eyes off of the thingies I am working on.
Its all tones and beat frequencies. I seem to be quite compatible having my equipment give me feedback that way.
Doesn't surprise me at all one would want to listen to it in the audio range. If you think about a bit, we have an incredible audio DSP between our ears.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]