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Thursday, March 24, 2022

Sonification of Data, Down Here and High Above

 We experimented with using a data sonification which represented sales results and breakthough types of cases.   Below is not the same thing, but I always fondly think of the use of  sound, properly designed, can give incentive and even insight.   Can you think of its use?

NASA Celebrates 5,000 Exoplanet Milestone with ‘Data Sonification’

Demonstration:  https://youtu.be/yv4DbU1CWAY 

By Ryan Whitwam on March 23, 2022 at 9:26 am

A few short decades ago, we could only speculate about the possibility of planets beyond our own solar system, but then we started finding them. Little by little, the universe has become a bustling place with more exoplanets being discovered every year. How many? NASA JPL says as of March 21st, there are just over 5,000 of them. To celebrate this milestone, the agency has produced a neat “data sonification” of the road to 5,000 exoplanets. Sonification is the use of non-speech audio to represent information. 

The first exoplanets were discovered in the early 90s, but they’re not the kind of planets you’re probably expecting. They’re more like charred husks tethered to a millisecond pulsar, a type of dead star that blasts out radiation like a rapidly spinning lighthouse. Throughout the 90s and early 2000s, telescopes spotted a few hundred exoplanets, but it wasn’t until the launch of the Kepler Space Telescope that things got cooking. 

NASA’s sonication begins in 1991 prior to the first exoplanet confirmations. Each time a new planet enters the catalog, there’s a chime and the counters at the top advance. It shows not only the approximate location of the exoplanet in the sky (using the central band of the Milky Way as a guide) but the types of detection. Early on, the detections are mostly from radial velocity, a technique that scans for minute wobbles in a star caused by the mass of orbiting planets. After Kepler, transits take over in a big way.   .... '

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