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Listen To The Universe On Your iPod
ptorrone writes "The New York Times had a great story about Dr. Mark Whittle, a professor of astronomy at the University of Virginia who has taken the cosmic background radiation of the universe and made a series of sounds. The folks over at Engadget made the sounds available in MP3s so you can listen to them on your computer, iPod or whatever. Also, If you'd like to read more about Dr. Mark Whittle's work visit his site, there are a lot of presentations and information regarding Big Bang Acoustics."
People have also turned gravitational wave simulations into sound files. Gravitational radiation can be a hard concept to explain to people, but make it into a sound file and it helps people (non-physicists) grasp the idea. Here's a page with a set of audio files for inspiral into Kerr Black holes.
A few years ago I made an audio file out of the gravitational wave background in our galaxy (from white-dwarf binary stars). It sounded rather like listening to the ocean... I wish I had kept a copy.
"I knew I shouldn't have eaten that burrito." -God
Teenager 2: The universe, man, the universe.
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
Some massaging of the data was needed...Dr. Whittle shifted the sounds to the human audible range, producing a chord like the sound of a jet engine. He used computer models to generate the cosmic chords from creation for the first million years and condensed them to five seconds.
I don't know much about sound, but this seems odd to me...if he's editing it this much, at what point is the guy just making his own music?
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Adult Toys
This only confirms my theory that the Big Bang originated somewhere in the near vicinity of Uranus. Not only was it ridiculously loud, but it also stank to high heaven.
I also reply below your current threshold.
It's the acoustic equivalent of a false color image.
Yes, exactly. And false-color images are used in astronomy all the time for a very good reason: they take information measured in wavelengths beyond the visual range and present it in a way that can be quickly understood by a human. It's not just about making pretty pictures (although I would say that's a bonus in some cases) - it's about presenting information in a human-understandable form. Of course you could process your IR or X-Ray astronomy pictures in a way that never involves making a visual representation of them, but then you miss out on the insight that comes from processing the image visually, which our brains are designed to do.
Likewise with gravitational waves: we have no biological way of experiencing them directly. We can measure them with sophisticated intstruments like LIGO and LISA (or at least we hope to soon). Any representation of a waveform is artificial, whether it be a plot, a datafile, or and audio file. And each format can be used to emphasize a different aspect of the data. In the case of gravitational waves, some of the frequency bands overlap with the sound frequencies the human ear is sensitive to - no need for artificially tweaking the frequencies to make it audible.
So I would strongly disagree that such representations interfere with understanding. As long as you are not misrepresenting the process you use to make a sound file or false-colour image, I would say they can only enhance our experience and understanding - for scientists as well as the general public.
Um, you guys did go to the linked engadget site before posting didn't you?
The title of THEIR article is:
"Listen to the sound of the Universe on your iPod"
and there's even a picture of an iPod there.
Now everyone just take a deep breath, Slashdot and Apple are not out to get you.