The Sound Barrier #4: Listen to the universe

11:25Wanda Diáz-Merced:That's Robert Wilson. Usually known as Bob. You spoke to him. Wanda was pretty pumped. Bob is extremely chill about the whole thing.

11:36Kim Arcand:We weren't even so impressed with cosmology.

11:41Wanda Diáz-Merced:Bob's almost 90 now, and he hasn't stopped. He's a senior scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. And he's one of the first names Wanda came across when she was diving into the history of listening to space. Because Bob and his partner used sound to help them find the first direct evidence of the Big Bang. And it happened by accident. Back in the 60s, Bob was pretty different. Well, I had hair. Still just as understated. And he was a young physicist working with his partner on a new antenna, trying to measure microwaves from outside the Milky Way. But when they went to make their first measurement, they noticed this problem.

12:23There was this booming signal.

12:26Kim Arcand:The antenna was twice as hot as it was supposed to be.

12:30Wanda Diáz-Merced:When Bob put on his headphones, it sounded like some kind of static. If you had a television and you turned to an off channel, you would get a hiss. Yeah, like the snow?

12:41Kim Arcand:Yeah, same effect. We were very disappointed at that point and started thinking about what could be wrong.

12:48Wanda Diáz-Merced:They kept listening to the sound to make sure it wasn't just noise from somewhere nearby, like the city. But no matter which direction they pointed the antenna, they still heard the hiss. So that couldn't be it. They thought it might be radiation from a nuclear weapons test. So they waited a few months, measured again, still had that hiss. Nothing had changed. They even thought it might be something, let's just say, closer to home.

13:14Kim Arcand:There was a pair of pigeons that lived in the antenna.

13:18Wanda Diáz-Merced:They're pigeons that lived in the antenna? Yes. Okay.

13:22Kim Arcand:We'd see them flying in and out. So we put a little bait in there, caught the pigeons, but none of that made any difference.

13:30Wanda Diáz-Merced:So even after the pigeons were gone, you still heard the hiss? Right. Bob still wasn't anywhere close to thinking about the Big Bang. He was still thinking about those freaking pigeons.

13:41Kim Arcand:They had deposited pigeon dropping inside the antenna.

13:45Wanda Diáz-Merced:There was poop in the antenna? Well, they'd been living in there.

13:48Kim Arcand:What do you expect? Okay. We just scrubbed it out. It wasn't a big deal.

13:55Wanda Diáz-Merced:Bob didn't really spend too much time pondering the origins of the universe. He figured it had just always been there.

14:02Kim Arcand:The idea that it's the same now as it was before and will be the same in the future.

14:08Wanda Diáz-Merced:That's what most people thought at that point. But there was this other idea that was starting to gain some traction. The Big Bang. That the universe started in this gigantic explosion. But Big Bang believers were still looking for their smoking gun.

14:23Kim Arcand:The expectation was if the universe started out very hot and full of radiation, it would still be full of radiation. There would be something left over from the initial explosion, which one could detect.

14:40Wanda Diáz-Merced:Bob started telling other scientists about the hiss. And when the Big Bang Brigade finally heard about it, they were like, Bob, you found it. That hiss, which is all over the place, all the time, and is definitely not pigeons. That's the leftover radiation from the Big Bang. When you found out that what you had been noticing for nine months could, I don't even know how to say this, could be the answer to the origin of the universe. What did you feel?

15:14Kim Arcand:I think we felt that, yes, that's a possibility. Maybe there's some other explanation. You just weren't that excited? Not terribly excited. We weren't quite ready to say that that's the only possibility.

15:33Wanda Diáz-Merced:About a year later, after a bunch of follow-up research, Bob got a call from a reporter at the New York Times. And finally, he started to buy into the hype.

15:44Kim Arcand:The next morning, my father walked down to the local pharmacy and bought a New York Times. And there on the front page of the New York Times was a picture of the anthem and an article about this discovery.

15:59Wanda Diáz-Merced:Written on top of that picture was the headline, Signals Imply a Big Bang Universe.

16:07Wanda Diáz-Merced:By the time Wando was learning about Bob's story, the Big Bang had become something astronomers and really lots of people just took for granted. Of course the universe had a beginning. Of course it was this really big explosion. But every fact that seems like bedrock truth once had a beginning, where it shifted from a wacky idea to something we all just accept. And for the Big Bang, that moment was when Bob and his partner noticed this signal. This is the actual sound they heard when they put on their headphones. A lot of it's just static from the instruments, but a good amount of it, like 10%, is the leftover radiation from the Big Bang.

16:54Wanda Diáz-Merced:It's the sound of the creation of the universe.

17:02Wanda Diáz-Merced:Bob and his partner eventually won a Nobel Prize for their work. And they created a precedent for Wanda to follow. That sound can play an essential role in some of the biggest scientific discoveries in history. So you can see why Wanda would kind of freak out when I brought up Bob.

17:19Robert Wilson:No, I'm so moved that you spoke to Wilson. Well done.

17:24Wanda Diáz-Merced:But Bob was only listening to a small slice of the universe. Microwaves that were shifted into our hearing range. In a minute, Wanda learns how to listen to everything else.

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21:03Wanda Diáz-Merced:A few years after Wanda started learning about listening to space, She found herself at NASA. She couldn't believe how she pulled it off. But she got an internship.

21:13Robert Wilson:That was a huge blessing because my grades were very, very, very, very, very, very bad.

21:20Wanda Diáz-Merced:And she wasn't just planning to listen to that tiny slice of the universe, the radio waves, the microwaves. She wanted to hear the meteors she saw as a kid. So she started working on something called sonification.

21:34Robert Wilson:Sonification is bringing information into the audible domain in order to augment your perception.

21:41Wanda Diáz-Merced:Sonification isn't what Wanda was doing when she heard that sunburst in her friend's backyard. Or what Bob was doing when he heard that hiss left over from the Big Bang. They were directly listening to things like radio waves or microwaves that were shifted into the range of human hearing. But sonification is a way to translate any kind of data into sound. You can take things we can see, like stars or galaxies, things we can't see, like x-rays or infrared light, and you can translate them into something we can hear. It's kind of like a Geiger counter, those little handheld gadgets that tell you about radiation levels by playing a bunch of clicks.

22:20Wanda Diáz-Merced:Those clicks aren't what radiation sounds like. They're just a translation of the data. They're a way for scientists to hear where the radiation is and how strong it is.

22:31Robert Wilson:Audio will increase perception to things that are blind to the human eye.

22:38Wanda Diáz-Merced:Sonifications don't need a sound like the Big Bang background fuzz or whooshing sunbursts. They can sound like anything, as long as they're clearly communicating the data. And it's often a lot easier to hear things than it is to see them. This is a sonification of a mouse walking. I love this example. every sound you're hearing is a pair of paws hitting the ground. And now, here's a mouse that has a genetic mutation, which makes it wobble when it walks. If you wanted to find out exactly when its paws hit the ground, it would be pretty hard to tell just by looking at it. But it's obvious when you listen.

23:21Wanda Diáz-Merced:So Wanda was curious if she could harness this potential for astronomers. And she set up a test.

23:29Robert Wilson:I simulated a task that astronomers used for the detection of black holes.

23:35Wanda Diáz-Merced:She gave scientists simulated data that looked like what happens when gas swirls around a black hole. There were graphs that showed where the radiation was strongest, and there were sounds that showed the same thing. Some examples were clear, other ones were trickier. And when astronomers used both the graphs and the sounds, they did better than when they just used one or the other. But audio was just about as good as a graph on its own. Sometimes even better. Which gave Wanda confidence that she could make new discoveries by listening to different parts of space. Like the merger of two neutron stars.

24:10Wanda Diáz-Merced:These ultra-dense remnants of exploded supernovas. Each hit you're listening to is a measurement of the energy given off by these two stars as they're orbiting each other. Louder hits, more energy. Softer hits, less energy. And Wanda chose to use these high-pitched timpani hits for this sonification so she could hear the tempo changes really clearly.

24:36Robert Wilson:If you hear, the changes, the ups and downs are quite uniform. But then at the end, there is an area where it seems the tempo is changing. It feels a little bit faster. Right there.

24:52Wanda Diáz-Merced:There's a little hiccup in the tempo.

24:54Robert Wilson:And he's telling me about how the system is rotating. It's not as uniform as we think.

25:03Wanda Diáz-Merced:She's even used sonification to find things no one had noticed before. Like in a gamma ray burst, this huge explosion that happens when a star dies.

25:12Robert Wilson:The interior of the star collapses under its own weight. And it starts rotating ever faster. Like an ice skater when pulling their arms in close to their body.

25:22Wanda Diáz-Merced:Wanda actually gave a TED Talk about this gamma ray burst. She decided to zoom into a part of it that other people might have missed. This part that might have just been confused for noise in the data.

25:34Robert Wilson:And I want you to hear what I heard. You will hear it as a very fast decrease in volume.

25:44Robert Wilson:It's frogs at home. Don't pay attention to that.

25:52Wanda Diáz-Merced:That's the fast decrease in volume she's talking about right there. It's really subtle. It's also kind of masked by a frog. But there's a moment where it gets softer. Here it is again.

26:07Wanda Diáz-Merced:Wanda says she's the first person to notice it.

26:10Robert Wilson:These resonances have not been identified by anyone. They had not been discovered before.

26:17Wanda Diáz-Merced:It's still kind of mysterious. And Wanda says there needs to be more research. But she thinks that tiny decrease in volume might offer new ways to understand these dying stars and the way they give birth to matter.

26:32Robert Wilson:The elements that form the molecules that form the chemical building blocks of life are produced at the final stages of a star.

26:44Wanda Diáz-Merced:Carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, the stuff that makes us us.

26:49Robert Wilson:They're building blocks of life.

26:51Wanda Diáz-Merced:They're made by stars and blown into space when they die. It was almost like Wanda was following in Bob's footsteps. Bob had heard evidence of the creation of the universe. And Wanda was hearing the first step in the creation of life.

27:14Wanda Diáz-Merced:These days, Wanda is an award-winning astronomer who's worked at places like the Arecibo Observatory, the Smithsonian Harvard Center for Astrophysics. And she's been traveling around the world trying to tell everyone she knows about sonification.

27:28Kim Arcand:I actually had met Wanda at a couple events and was just fascinated by her work and the idea of translating information to sound. And that just set off an inspirational light bulb for me.

27:41Wanda Diáz-Merced:That's Kim Arkand. She's a visualization scientist at NASA's Chandra Observatory. the biggest X-ray telescope in the world.

27:48Kim Arcand:X-ray data is inherently out of the human realm of vision, right? We cannot see anything besides visible light. And so having X-ray images only just seemed like it didn't really make much sense.

28:04Wanda Diáz-Merced:Why not listen instead?

28:06Kim Arcand:Why are we not prioritizing other methods of experiencing the universe around us? And so moving into sonification just made sense.

28:15Wanda Diáz-Merced:Kim decided to take some of her data and convert it into sound. Like, here's a sonification Kim made of what might be my favorite space photograph, the Pillars of Creation. You might have seen it before. It's these three towers where stars are created, made up of gas and dust.

28:35Wanda Diáz-Merced:The sounds you're hearing are based on a combination of the Hubble photograph and X-ray data from Chandra.

28:41Kim Arcand:It's going to pan from left to right, and you're going to be hearing essentially a mapping of that data as we scan across it. The combination of the beeps and boops, if you will, of that X-ray information that's tracing all of those slightly older stars. And then you're also going to hear the sort of texture and structure of those tall pillars of gas and dust in the optical light.

29:16Kim Arcand:So this is the inner Milky Way and the supermassive black hole that's lurking at the core.

29:24Wanda Diáz-Merced:This is another sonification Kim made. It's the galactic center. She combined images from three different telescopes taken in three types of light. There's an image in infrared light, which is below what we can see. There's visible light from the Hubble. And there's an image in X-ray light. which is above what we can see. And if you want to listen to this sonification with the visuals, we've got a link in the show notes where you can see it, so please check that out. But yeah, Kim decided to use different instruments to clearly differentiate between the three kinds of light.

29:55Kim Arcand:So in this case, the sounds that we assigned was the piano to the lowest energy from infrared light, plucky violin for the mid-range from Hubble,

30:15Kim Arcand:And then the highest energy is the glockenspiel.

30:20Wanda Diáz-Merced:And the glockenspiel was the x-ray?

30:22Kim Arcand:That is the x-ray light. So you can hopefully hear that little crescendo at the end. That is our supermassive black hole.

30:35Kim Arcand:So it's really singing in x-ray light, which is, again, very useful, right? This is an image that I had created with some colleagues and I was so familiar with it, right? So familiar. But the first time I ever heard this piece all the way through, like I really had to take a moment because it changed how I thought of this data set. I was like, what is happening over there? Like, what is that over there? I never noticed. This is so strong there. How did I not notice that?

31:07Wanda Diáz-Merced:listening to data like this it allows you to hear changes in everything from pitch to volume to timbre to rhythm and you can hear them all at the same time listening allows you to pick out one sound to focus on over background noise like listening to someone you're talking to in a noisy room and maybe most importantly it forces you to slow down when i'm looking at a data set that's an

31:33Kim Arcand:image, I'm looking at all of the data at one time. There's a lot of information for your eye to parse at any particular moment. But if I am listening to data of one of those same objects that I'm used to looking at, I am getting the information over time. And it just, for me at least, allows me to think through what it is I'm listening to in a very different way.

32:03Wanda Diáz-Merced:But I want to go one step further here. It's easy to think of astronomy as this fundamentally visual thing. You know, this pure idea of just gazing up at the stars. And if I'm being honest, that's how I felt before I started working on this story. I felt like audio was a nice complement to an image. You know, a way to double-check it. Maybe a way to get a fresh take on something you've seen a hundred times before. But still, secondary.

32:33Kim Arcand:It makes sense. Like, it makes total sense. Seeing is believing is a phrase for a reason, right? But so much data from these telescopes is essentially all invisible to us. We are not able to capture it with human vision. So it has to undergo a process of transformation just to get to an image.

32:50Wanda Diáz-Merced:Even when we're not using infrared light or x-ray light, images often aren't what they seem. Like that famous photo of the Pillars of Creation, the pillars aren't actually that red. The red's just a way to tell us there's sulfur there. The greens and blues are just a way to let us know there's hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. If you were traveling in a spaceship by the pillars, it would look totally different.

33:14Kim Arcand:A lot of the structure that we're able to see in the pillars is existing in non-visible kinds of light, which you wouldn't be able to see any of it.

33:22Wanda Diáz-Merced:So what are the real pillars of creation? Is it that famous photo with the reds and greens? Is it a newer infrared photo where there are so many stars that the pillars are almost see-through? Or is Kim's sonification just as real?

33:36Kim Arcand:To me, sonification is a natural extension of the data because you're just moving it from one form of authentic data to another, right? There's no lack of validity or authenticity because we are moving it from a visual to a sound.

33:58Wanda Diáz-Merced:I've been coming back to this idea over and over again since I started working on this series. By this point, we've spent four episodes talking about how much of the world we hear is constructed by our brain. But it's not just sound. It's all our senses. I think Dan Polly, the tinnitus researcher I talked to, put it pretty well. Because the brain doesn't have direct contact with the physical world, everything that we perceive as consciousness is constructed from the activity of the brain. Sonification is a reminder that no matter what sense we use, we're still going to have blind spots. No representation of reality is more valid or real than any other one.

34:44Kim Arcand:I've had multiple people who are blind or low vision approach us and say, I didn't think I could even do astronomy because it's so visual. Sonification of these types of objects has shown me that I might be welcomed working for NASA, working at an observatory.

35:03Robert Wilson:I had a group of 13 students this summer. And I remember they said, I never thought I would be able to do it. It was by listening to the data that I realized that I can continue forward.

35:22Wanda Diáz-Merced:Wanda's still pushing sonification even further. She's working with the Royal Academy of Science International Trust to launch an institute for multisensory science in Lisbon this January. And she isn't just excited about accessibility. She's excited about how scientists want to sonify 20 ,000 galaxies in order to look for patterns they might have missed, how they're analyzing gravitational waves from merging black holes, how they've even proposed using sonification as a new way to search for dark matter.

35:52Robert Wilson:It's exciting to have more people with different skills contributing to the mainstream, studying things that we never thought existed before.

36:09Wanda Diáz-Merced:As I was talking to Wanda, I started thinking back to the very first episode we did on this show about Vera Rubin, the scientist who discovered dark matter, how people ignored her because she was a woman, how she was kept out of scientific institutions, how somehow she never received a Nobel Prize. There were so many moments when she could have just stopped. And if that had happened, who knows? Maybe we'd still have no idea that most of the universe is missing. How many other scientific ideas are we leaving undiscovered? Because we're making it too hard for different kinds of people, with all kinds of perspectives and sensory biases, to do science.

36:54Wanda Diáz-Merced:What might happen if we made it easier?

36:57Robert Wilson:People that are not like the current workforce in physics, astronomy, mathematics, the sciences, they will be transformed from beneficiaries to benefactors and to agents of change. If we bring more skills to science, we will have to delete the word limit. The emergence of science will be incredible.

37:38Wanda Diáz-Merced:This was the final episode of our series, The Sound Barrier. It was reported and produced by me, Noam Hassenfeld. I also wrote the music. Editing by Joanna Salataroff. Mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala. The best kinds of explosions from Sally Helm. and really nuanced, detailed fact-checking from Melissa Hirsch. Melissa checked so many facts for this series and just made all of it so much better. Melissa, you are amazing. Meredith Hodnott runs the show. Jorge Just and Julia Longoria are editorial directors. And Bird Pinkerton surveyed the scene in front of her. Hundreds of traitorous platypuses cowering while their former octopus allies stood over them, preventing them from moving.

38:21Wanda Diáz-Merced:but the birds had abandoned them and Aaron Bird had vanished.

38:30Wanda Diáz-Merced:Thanks to Vartika Sharma and Paige Vickers for the beautiful artwork for the Sound Barrier series. Thanks as always to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show along with me and Bird. And if any of you out there have thoughts about the show, send us an email. We're at unexplainable at vox.com. You can also leave us a review or a rating wherever you listen. Really helps us out. And if you're into supporting the show and all of Vox in general, join our membership program. You can go to vox.com slash members to sign up. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll be back next week.

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