Sonification and sound design for astronomy research, education and public engagement & More Latest News Here – Up Jobs

For the rest of this article we focus on the conscious attempts to apply the techniques of sound design and sonification in an astronomy context. Through a community effort, we have collated 98 such applications, as of December 2021, into the repository Data Sonification Archive⁴⁰, with an ‘astronomy’ tag. This compilation is a combination of self-submissions to the archive, a targeted survey to people known to be interested in the topic, Internet searches and discussions during a dedicated workshop⁴¹. Although our compilation is probably not complete, we believe it is representative enough to draw basic conclusions about the trends and behaviours in this area. In the following we discuss the results obtained by analysing this data collection (Figs. 2 and 3). The archive is open for new submissions and therefore can constantly be updated with new or historic examples.

In Fig. 2 we show the evolution in the number of known astronomy sound design and sonification projects through time. This information is also presented in Table 1. Documented and conscious attempts to sonify space science data were made by Donald Gurnett, who from 1962 to 2012 used sound to analyse and convey information from different space missions, such as Cassini and Voyager. Sonification made possible the discovery of Saturnian lightning, waves with frequency of a few hertz to a few kilohertz, and that of Saturn kilometric radiation, emitted by electrons in Saturn’s auroral zones⁴². Since 1996, Fig. 2 reveals a rise in the number of known sonification and sound design astronomy projects per year, with between 8 and 19 new projects launched each year since 2016.

In Fig. 3 we show what the primary goals of sonification projects are: research, public engagement, inspiration for art, BVI accessibility and education. We also split projects on the basis of their target audience: the general public and researchers (which we note includes students at university level). Finally, Fig. 3 shows whether sonification has been used in tandem with other media, such as data visualization, graphic interfaces, videos and haptic elements. This information is also presented in Tables 2 and 3.

The majority of projects currently available have a primary goal of public engagement (about 36%) or research (about 26%). About 17% have a primarily artistic purpose and only about 8% are for education. Perhaps surprisingly, making astronomy BVI accessible was only listed as the primary goal for 13% of the projects; however, a further 22% of the projects mention accessibility as their secondary goal. This highlights that sonification is primarily being considered for a wide range of audiences, whilst increasing accessibility may be considered a natural additional outcome when multisensory data representations are adopted.

With the current set of projects, irrespective of their primary goal, most of the sonifications (79%) are designed for the general public (which includes school pupils) as opposed to researchers (21%). Interestingly, we found that even 30% of the projects with research as their primary goal are using sonification primarily to help communicate the astronomical research to the general public (Fig. 3 and Table 2). Although we do not have data on the number of researchers actually using sonification for their work, these findings, along with anecdotal evidence, suggest that the number remains small at this time. Nonetheless, there is a clear increasing trend of using sonification for public engagement and education.

Another finding from our surveys is that most of the projects use a multisensory approach (64%) rather than sound only (Fig. 3 and Table 3). Most common is to combine sonification with visuals, with 62% of projects combining sound with graphical visualizations, videos or a graphical user interface (GUI). Interestingly, most projects that have accessibility as their primary goal mix sonification with videos or a GUI. Possible reasons for this use of mixed media include the fact that the project aims at engaging both BVI and sighted users and therefore visuals are included (as recommended by Pérez-Montero³) and/or the tool has been created by sighted developers who are used to working with a visual interface. We note that ensuring tool accessibility is critical, and this has not always been successfully implemented during the development of sonification tools⁴³.

Only a minority of the projects (2%) use haptic elements, and these all have education as their primary goal (Fig. 3). The haptic elements can be three-dimensional models (for example, Sense the Universe, S.V. and A.Z., manuscript in preparation) or vibrations of the device (for example, A4BD (https://www.a4bd.eu/) uses vibration to indicate the contours and shape of the image). There are many more public engagement/accessibility astronomical projects available that use tactile supports, but they are not included in this Perspective as they do not pair it with sound^44,45.

Finally, two-thirds of the projects are interactive, as they allow a certain degree of user choice in the data–sound-parameter mapping, the use of command line and/or GUI, and/or the possibility to interact with the data or device.

Common themes and trends of astronomy sonification and sound design

Currently, the approach taken for the sonification or sound design for astronomy applications is not standardized, which is one of the major limitations preventing sonification from becoming a mainstream tool. However, commonalities in the way different groups and projects sonify data can already be identified. For example, when the project or tool addresses the public, it focuses more on inspiring the audience and conveying a single message rather than being closely related to the underlying data. The opposite is true for projects meant for researchers. For public audiences, the sound is carefully designed and there is extra attention to the pleasantness of the sonification: aesthetics is more important than accurate parameter mapping in these cases (for example, in planetarium shows^25,46). This is even more extreme when data are used primarily for artistic inspiration, where the scientific content of the representation is minimal and aesthetics is the main driver (for example, A Galaxy of Suns (https://www.agalaxyofsuns.net/)). This approach is similar to the one used to visually represent the data: beautiful pictures are shown to the public, whereas raw data are used for research purposes⁴⁷.

Most current sonification projects designed for astronomy research sonify one-dimensional (for example, spectra) or time-series data (for example, light curves) and two-dimensional images or graphs. The sonification of three-dimensional and in general multidimensional datasets is less advanced and only a few tools are currently available. Most one-dimensional sonifications scroll through the data, playing a single data point at a time (for example, Astronify (https://astronify.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)), whereas two-dimensional sonifications allow the user to explore the image or graphs with their fingers/cursor (for example, Vox Magellan) or scan through the image hearing one whole dimension simultaneously or multiple parameters at once in either multiple tones or the timbre of the tone (for example, Afterglow (https://afterglow.skynetjuniorscholars.org/core/login?next=https%3A%2F%2Fafterglow.skynetjuniorscholars.org%2Fauthorized) and AstreOS (https://astreos.space/)).

The majority of astronomy sonification projects link data to sound characteristics by using the parameter mapping technique (see the ‘Sound design and sonification’ section). Pitch is the most commonly used auditory dimension, explained by the fact that it is known to be the most prominent sound attribute⁴⁸ and that humans remember pitch relationships (for example, melodies) better than loudness relationships or timbre relationships⁴⁹. Pitch is generally associated with the dependent variable data dimension in astronomy applications, as it is often associated with brightness. Sound spatialization is also used and generally associated with sky coordinates. Some projects have begun to exploit timbre for classification purposes (for example, STRAUSS (https://strauss.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) for the classification of galaxy spectra) and loudness has been used at times to represent distance (Varano & Zanella, submitted manuscript). Surprisingly, duration has rarely been used, despite the good capability of humans to discriminate against sound duration. Due to the temporal nature of sound, this could be explained by a sort of bias making one of the most obvious mappings implicit⁴⁸. Uncertainties are generally not included in the sonic representation, although some attempts exist (for example, StarSound and sonoUno). Despite all of this work, there have been few or no attempts during the development of these tools to carry out extensive testing to establish the best approach to sound mapping (see also the next section).

Challenges and proposed solutions

While the number of sound design and sonification projects of astronomical data has steadily increased (Fig. 2), sound design and sonification is not yet incorporated into mainstream research tools, and remains a niche approach for education and communication. Possible reasons preventing sonification from becoming mainstream are (1) a lack of training and familiarity in sonification and (2) a lack of standardization, evaluation and dissemination. We explore these in more detail below.

Training and familiarity

Using the approach of sonification to explore data requires the listener to learn how to convert the characteristics of the sound into the properties of the data, with so-called ‘reduced listening’^50,51. Our current education and research methods focus on visualization, and we are not trained to listen attentively for the purpose of gaining and analysing complex information, a required skill to effectively use sonification⁵². Indeed, a recent online survey showed that astronomy and data analysis experts (that is, those with relevant PhDs and careers) performed no better than non-experts at identifying mock signals of planet transits in sonified versions of noisy light curves; however, the experts performed significantly better than the non-experts when using standard visualizations of the same datasets (C.H., J.T.B. and A.Z., manuscript in preparation). This study suggested that sonification could be used to effectively identify signals (at least for high signal-to-noise ratios); however, just as for interpreting graphical representations, training and familiarity are crucial to being effective and efficient at interpreting noisy data.

Introducing attentive listening and sonification tools into the mainstream education curriculum, in tandem with data visualization, would be a first step towards training the next generation to tap the potential of using sound for analysis and interpretation^4,18,53. Sonification would then also be a powerful tool to adopt to ensure the accessibility of astronomy from schools through to the academic environment. Towards this goal, several promising calculator and graphical applications that include speech outputs and sonification have been developed in the last years, such as Desmos graphing calculator (https://www.desmos.com/calculator), SAS Graphics Accelerator⁵⁴ and Stocks (preinstalled app on Apple’s iPhone and iPad). Making Desmos the default calculator for mainstream secondary school online examinations would be key to allow all students to use the same calculators, independently of their level of vision and preferred learning style.

Standardization, evaluation and dissemination

There is a long history of visual presentation of data that has allowed us to develop sophisticated graphics and visualizations with now widely accepted standard approaches²¹. In contrast, we have yet to converge on a set of standard approaches to represent data through sound¹. Adopting universally accepted standards is key to making sonification generally understandable and mainstream. For increasing accessibility, it would also mean that BVI users did not need to create and define new approaches from scratch.

The lack of systematic published evaluation of the usefulness and effectiveness of sonification in general prevents its widespread adoption, especially for research purposes⁴⁸. Diaz-Merced¹ came to a similar conclusion, specifically for astronomy applications, reporting that most publications on sonification of numerical data focus on sonification techniques rather than evaluating their usability.

During a multidisciplinary workshop⁴¹ we established that various sound-based astronomy projects have gathered anecdotal or informal evidence on the efficacy of sonification (for example, AstreOS, A4BD). These have led to positive feedback from users, in particular for inspiring BVI children and adults. However, only a few projects have, or are in the process of, publishing quantitative evaluation of their sonifications⁴⁶ (Varano & Zanella, submitted manuscript; Tucker Brown et al., manuscript in preparation). Moreover, these studies do not explore multiple sonification approaches, for example changing the parameter mapping, to establish the most effective approach in different applications. This would be a first step towards establishing standards and preventing different groups repeating the creation of similar sonification tools that might not use optimal approaches.

Quantitatively demonstrating the usefulness of sonification and sound design would help convince sceptical academics and educators to consider these approaches and, in turn, to convince funding agencies to support this line of research. To make sonification a more robust and widespread representation method of astronomical datasets we urge the community to carefully define their goals from the beginning of the design phase, as well as defining and carrying on a rigorous evaluation plan, possibly following the guidelines highlighted by Lenzi et al.⁵⁵, Giordano et al.⁵⁶ and N.M. et al. (manuscript in preparation).

We note that one challenge to the creation of universally accepted standards is cultural differences, such as the use of different musical scales and harmonies. However, to guide choices it is possible to draw upon some everyday experiences that may cross cultural barriers, such as the fact that heavier objects sound louder when dropped; the damping of sound waves in the transmission medium decreases the sound intensity as the distance of the sound source increases; the frequency of a sound wave changes due to the Doppler effect, depending on the relative position between the listener and the sound source⁸.

Having the community systematically publishing peer-reviewed articles on their findings related to sonification of astronomical data, having conferences that encourage speakers to use sonifications when they present graphs, and having academic journals sonifying graphs and visual contents would help make sonification more mainstream in the astronomical academic environment.

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