Using telescopes to render sound instead of images

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Some people coded an image made with the Hubble telescope so that the data is rendered in sound instead of an image.
https://www.sciencealert.com/nasa-has-translated-a-hubble-photo-into-music-and-it-s-absolutely-chilling

While this is quite an interesting creative idea about data interpretation, it evokes another question, which is whether waves recorded in time (as opposed to still images) could and/or should be interpreted in terms of audible sound.

On the one hand, we can't say that there is anything close to atmospheric pressure for acoustic waves to travel through gas outside the atmosphere, but there are waves of plasma wind and maybe other sequences of particle interactions that could be recorded and rendered as audio.

Listening to such an audio recording would be more similar to techniques used to render invisible parts of the spectrum, such as infrared, UV, and gamma; in telescope photography, because in both cases the goal is to render data more accessibly in a format that matches what it actually represents; i.e. still photography of different parts of the light spectrum or sequences of energy waves that don't all arrive at the same moment of a snapshot.

Do you think this would be a useful endeavor, or do you think there would be problems or other reasons not to bother?

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@livinglava,

It is cool. It is not scientifically useful for most people.

Many years ago I was part of a project to write software that would turn data into sound. The goal was to make graphs representing mathematical functions into a form that would be accessible to blind students. A sighted student can see a parabola going up to a peak and then down again. Blind students should have the same experience.

This was cool. But, it is much more efficient to represent data in a visual form.

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@livinglava,

NASA has been transcribing radio waves into sound waves for some time now.

https://soundcloud.com/nasa/sets/spookyspacesounds

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@InfraBlue,

Either artistic or PR or both. I have never seen any artistic value to this exercise.

We usually go the other way, decomposing sounds into visual representations. These spectragrams represent sounds (often speech). I have a friend who looking at these spectragrams can read them back into the words they represent....

http://www.opentextbooks.org.hk/system/files/resource/9/9648/9759/media/image659.png

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@maxdancona,

maxdancona wrote:

It is cool. It is not scientifically useful for most people.

Many years ago I was part of a project to write software that would turn data into sound. The goal was to make graphs representing mathematical functions into a form that would be accessible to blind students. A sighted student can see a parabola going up to a peak and then down again. Blind students should have the same experience.

This was cool. But, it is much more efficient to represent data in a visual form.

My point is that what they are representing as sound is not anything like sound because sound involves a sequence of waves, while an image is a snapshot of all the waves arriving from different sources at the same moment.

What I'm saying is that they could record the various waves of plasma wind and other particles that reach their 'microphone' for a period of time and translate that into audible frequencies.

Doing so would be similar to taking an xray, infrared, or gamma photograph and translating that into the visible light frequency to render a visible photograph.

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@livinglava,

I don't get your point. The spectragrams are time based.

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@maxdancona,

maxdancona wrote:

I don't get your point. The spectragrams are time based.

When you listen to a sound recording, it has a duration. A photgraph doesn't because it's a snapshot.

So if you put some form of 'microphone' out in orbit to record ion-concentration variations and/or sequences of cosmic ray interactions with the detector/'microphone,' then the recording is actually similar to a sound recording, i.e. because it is a series of frequency variations over time and not a snapshot of a visual field.

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@livinglava,

There are many visual representations of data that have a "duration". The spectragrams, for example. The "x-axis" is time.

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@maxdancona,

maxdancona wrote:

There are many visual representations of data that have a "duration". The spectragrams, for example. The "x-axis" is time.

Are you talking about a spectrograph of an element's emissions spectrum?

Are you starting to try to find something to debate here? Why are you so addicted to debate?

Do you understand what I am saying about sound in contrast to a visual image/snapshot.

They basically made 'music' by scanning the pixels of an image and 'displaying' them as 'music,' but that doesn't make sense because a snapshot captures all the light of all the different pixels simultaneously.

Sound recordings are different. Each note of a music recording arrives in time/sequence. All the notes don't arrive simultaneously.

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@livinglava,

You asked a question, I gave you the answer. This is an area I have expertise in. There is nothing to debate here.

You can make a graphical representation where time is on the x-axis. In this case you can talk about a duration. I gave you an example of such a graph which happens to be a graph sound that happens over a duration.

We do this quite often in engineering and in science.

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@maxdancona,

maxdancona wrote:

You asked a question, I gave you the answer. This is an area I have expertise in. There is nothing to debate here.

You're debating by avoiding acknowledgment that sounds take time while images are just a snapshot of a single moment.

Quote:

You can make a graphical representation where time is on the x-axis. In this case you can talk about a duration. I gave you an example of such a graph which happens to be a graph sound that happens over a duration.

You're talking about representing sound visually with time on the x-axis, but that is the opposite of what they did by translating an image made by the Hubble telescope into an audio recording of 'music.'

What you're not acknowledging because you are a person who likes to cause problems by opposing other people, is that there are energy waves that are traveling around outside the atmosphere that could be recorded and translated into an audio recording.

I don't know why I get into these exchanges with you because I can already tell you're trying to make it difficult for me to communicate, but for some reason I maintain this stupid hope that you'll just understand what I'm saying and acknowledge it.

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@livinglava,

There is no fight here Lava. What they did is cool! It makes neat sounds and stokes the imagination.

There is no value to this representation in a scientific or engineering context. In science and engineering we find visual representations far more valuable. I did point out a use in education when it comes to students who are blind.

But what they did is cool.

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People used to use sound as a measuring device, back before the 1980s. If you have two frequencies with a very slight difference, the human ear will detect what are known as "beats" as the two sound waves slide in and out of phase with each other. Some of the engineers (generally older than I am) were quite good at making accurate adjustments based on sound.

People my age learned on an oscilloscope. You can set the scope so that one wave is on the x-axis and the other on the y-axis, it would make cool patterns called Lissajous figures that were pretty easy to read and interpret. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lissajous_curve

We the advent of modern signal processing, I haven't had any need to do this in decades.

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@maxdancona,

maxdancona wrote:

There is no fight here Lava. What they did is cool! It makes neat sounds and stokes the imagination.

There is no value to this representation in a scientific or engineering context. In science and engineering we find visual representations far more valuable. I did point out a use in education when it comes to students who are blind.

But what they did is cool.

I didn't say it's not interesting 'art' made from data.

I'm just pointing out that there are energy waves that are more analogous to sound outside the atmosphere and those can be translated into an audible frequency.

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@maxdancona,

maxdancona wrote:

People used to use sound as a measuring device, back before the 1980s. If you have two frequencies with a very slight difference, the human ear will detect what are known as "beats" as the two sound waves slide in and out of phase with each other. Some of the engineers (generally older than I am) were quite good at making accurate adjustments based on sound.

People my age learned on an oscilloscope. You can set the scope so that one wave is on the x-axis and the other on the y-axis, it would make cool patterns called Lissajous figures that were pretty easy to read and interpret. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lissajous_curve

We the advent of modern signal processing, I haven't had any need to do this in decades.

You're ruminating about tangential sound-related issues, but this thread is about recording 'sound' outside the atmosphere by recording analogous energy waves received through time and translating those into audible frequencies.

Basically I'm talking about doing with sound what is done with xray/gamma/infrared astronomy photography by translating the images into colors of the visible spectrum.

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@livinglava,

Sure. That's cool.

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Using telescopes to render sound instead of images

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