Gravitational waves are ideal for converting into sound. At the moment of impact, a soft chirp has already turned into quiet sounds. On the rare occasions when my phone can hear a sound, my ringtone is one of those calls. Now the team
Audio Universe has taken gravitational wave data to a whole new level.

The visuals and sounds are amazing in the 3D video, where the sound of gravitational waves hits you from the direction of the sky they are presumably coming from. As you navigate with a mouse, phone or VR headset, you can be enveloped by tiny vibrations in space-time.

“Using our best guess of where these signals are coming from in the sky, we can use spatial audio to place them around the listener and light up the sky at those locations. Using our STRAUSS code to create the audio, we can speed up the timing and the signals a little bit to get them into an audible range and fit it all into the video,” Dr James Trayford from the University of Portsmouth told IFLScience.

Like other ultrasound projects, it complements other approaches, such as Tactile Universe, by enabling blind and low-vision people to participate in astronomy. But there is more to the motivation than that.

“There are three reasons why we wanted to do this. It helps researchers explore complex multi-dimensional datasets. It can be used to create engaging and interesting educational resources. It can make astronomy more accessible, which is absolutely crucial,” Rose Shepherd from Newcastle University told IFLScience. “Making things accessible actually makes them better for everyone.”

A particularly interesting aspect of exploratory sounding is the possibility of listening to the radiation lines of celestial bodies. Peaks in the light spectrum of a particular object spread out as the object moves, and ultrasound can transform something that is visually very subtle into something obvious to the ear.

But it’s not just useful for astronomy. The team explored how different datasets could be enhanced by adding an audio element. One interesting example is Warming Stripes , a minimalist chart that uses a series of colour bars from blue to red to show temperature anomalies over the years. The left side represents decades ago, and the bars get redder as you get closer to the right. It’s great for visualising the climate crisis that’s unfolding, and now audio adds a little more to that.

“You can use sounds to give your data an emotional interpretation. You can use that to convey certain emotions into the data,” Shepherd explained. [озвученням Warming Stripes] “We weren’t trying to stress people out, but it was interesting to see people’s reactions compared to just watching the video.”

Audio Universe is developing a Sonification Toolkit that can be used by many to create custom resources.