DATA EXPLORATION

Introducing COLIBRE's Sonified Interactive Maps

Along with these movies giving new insight into the history of individual COLIBRE galaxies, sound can also help us explore this virtual universe. By combining sonified and visible layers, users can get new insights into hidden physics, such as those ruling the universe we see through telescopes.

By enabling sonification, users can start to uncover physics they don't see simply by moving the cursor, such as the unseen network of matter connecting galaxies in a 'cosmic web'. Can you hear the intensifying whoosh representing higher gas temperatures around galaxies? Or the fast ticking represent the high rate of X-ray radiation? Perhaps the evolving sound of a chord helps you find a clump of dark matter without any stars?

This tool is intended to give users freedom to explore: you can choose to combine and represent layers however you like with our three sonification 'voices', those we developed for the videos. By building their own combination, users can help us to find new and better ways of applying this technique.

The sonified maps are avalaible to explore here.

This interactive tool is just the start - the plan is to develop these approaches and extend them to other areas of science and walks of life through the Audio Universe. 

We have been developing approaches to turn spectra into sound. Light spectra, can be directly, and intuitively be turned into a sound spectrum. The result is that the features in the light spectrum at different wavelengths correspond to the different frequencies that make up the corresponding sound. We introduced this approach in Trayford et al. 2023. This example is a galaxy spectra containing a supermassive black hole. The bright features in the spectra (emission lines) correspond to different transitions associated with different chemical species. Each features results in a specific tone that can be heard in the sound. You can try this out for yourself below in the browser-based notebooks.

This mock data, shows how we can turn time-series day into sound. In this example the "brightness" values in the data are mapped to a cut-off frequency applied to a musical chord. The result of this is the sound appears to be "brighter" for higher (brighter) data values and duller for lower data values. More detail is presented in Tucker-Brown et al. 2022. 

This is just one of the many approaches to sonification that can be achieved with STRAUSS. You can try out different approaches using the browser-based notebook below.

With our code you can listen to multiple variables at the same time! This can be particularly useful if you want to understand how different variables relate to one another. In this example, from Trayford et al. 2023, we can listed to (1) the star formation rate (SFR) and (2) the ‘metal’ mass fraction (known as ’stellar metallicity’), of a simulated galaxy from the EAGLE simulations over 13 billion years of cosmic time. The metallicity is mapped to a low-pass filter cut off frequency (see right axes), and we provide two different example mappings for simultaneously mapping the star formation rate to volume low frequency oscillator frequency, as represented in the axes.  You can try this for yourself with the browser-based notebook below!