APOD: Sonified: Eagle Nebula Pillars (2020 Sep 30)

[APOD Robot]

Sonified: Eagle Nebula Pillars

Explanation: Yes, but have you ever experienced the Eagle Nebula with your ears ? The famous nebula, M16, is best known for the feast it gives your eyes, highlighting bright young stars forming deep inside dark towering structures. These light-years long columns of cold gas and dust are some 6,500 light-years distant toward the constellation of the Serpent (Serpens). Sculpted and eroded by the energetic ultraviolet light and powerful winds from M16's cluster of massive stars, the cosmic pillars themselves are destined for destruction. But the turbulent environment of star formation within M16, whose spectacular details are captured in this combined Hubble (visible) and Chandra (X-ray) image, is likely similar to the environment that formed our own Sun. In the featured video, listen for stars and dust sounding off as the line of sonification moves left to right, with vertical position determining pitch.

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[bystander]

viewtopic.php?t=41029

[scr33d]

This is just silly.

[Ann]

That's a bit like mapped color, I guess. Not realistic. But not completely uninteresting.

Ann

[wolfie138]

this must be where the Clangers live.

[Dan]

Right out of Forbidden Planet...

[orin stepanek]

I thought when the electric current passed over the nebular dust they might get animated! I liked that weird Music though!

[XgeoX]

I find this a fascinating new way to process data from an image I have seen thousands of times. It’s interesting to close your eyes while listening to it and let a different area of your brain interpret the data instead of the visual part.
This would be a useful way for visually impaired people to “see” an image.
Cool stuff!

Eric

[E Fish]

Is there anything standardized about this or is it just whatever they decide they want it to be? I realize that it's mostly for fun and listening to it is interesting. I followed the link about sonification and they used different sounds for the Milky Way. Is this like when NASA converted the data from the planets into creepy sounds? I've played those for my classes around Halloween before.

[NateWhilk]

Right out of Forbidden Planet...

Exactly what I was thinking.

[johnnydeep]

Is there anything standardized about this or is it just whatever they decide they want it to be? I realize that it's mostly for fun and listening to it is interesting. I followed the link about sonification and they used different sounds for the Milky Way. Is this like when NASA converted the data from the planets into creepy sounds? I've played those for my classes around Halloween before.

Yes, the sonification link was more specific about how they mapped the image to sounds, and the x-ray/visible/composite differences were interesting.

I'll bet it doesn't really matter at what angle the scanning line is at: vertical, horizontal, 45 degrees, or any other angle, probably sound equally "interesting". I suppose you could even use a non-straight line for other effects.

[Astronymus]

Right out of Forbidden Planet...

Exactly what I was thinking.

Indeed. More 70's/80's cheap space movie though.

[neufer]

Right out of Forbidden Planet...

Exactly what I was thinking.

<<Forbidden Planet's innovative electronic music score, credited as "electronic tonalities", partly to avoid having to pay any of the film industry music guild fees, was composed by Bebe and Louis Barron. MGM producer Dore Schary discovered the couple quite by chance at a beatnik nightclub in Greenwich Village while on a family Christmas visit to New York City; Schary hired them on the spot to compose his film's musical score. While the theremin (which was not used in Forbidden Planet) had been used on the soundtrack of Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945), the Barrons' electronic composition is credited with being the first completely electronic film score; their soundtrack preceded the invention of the Moog synthesizer by eight years (1964).

In 1963, American engineer Robert Moog, who designed and sold theremins, met composer Herb Deutsch at a New York State School Music Association trade fair. Deutsch had been making electronic music using a theremin, tape recorder, and single-pitch oscillator, a time-consuming process that involved splicing tape. Recognizing the need for more practical and sophisticated equipment, Moog and Deutsch discussed the notion of a "portable electronic music studio". Previous synthesizers, such as the RCA Mark II, had created sound from hundreds of vacuum tubes. Instead, Moog used recently available silicon transistors — specifically, a transistor with an exponential relationship between input voltage and output current. With this, he created the voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO), which generated a waveform whose pitch could be adjusted by changing the voltage. Moog designed his synthesizer around a standard of one volt per octave. Similarly, he used voltage to control loudness with voltage-controlled amplifiers (VCAs)>>

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

<<The theremin is an electronic musical instrument controlled without physical contact by the thereminist (performer). It is named after its inventor, Leon Theremin, who patented the device in 1928. The instrument's controlling section usually consists of two metal antennas that sense the relative position of the thereminist's hands and control oscillators for frequency with one hand, and amplitude (volume) with the other. The electric signals from the theremin are amplified and sent to a loudspeaker. The sound of the instrument is often associated with eerie situations. Thus, the theremin has been used in movie soundtracks such as Miklós Rózsa's Spellbound and The Lost Weekend, Bernard Herrmann's The Day the Earth Stood Still.

The theremin was the product of Soviet government-sponsored research into proximity sensors. The instrument was invented by a young Russian physicist named Lev Sergeyevich Termen (known in the West as Leon Theremin) in October 1920 after the outbreak of the Russian Civil War. After a lengthy tour of Europe, during which time he demonstrated his invention to packed houses, Theremin moved to the United States, where he patented his invention in 1928. Subsequently, Theremin granted commercial production rights to RCA. In 1938, Theremin left the United States, though the circumstances related to his departure are in dispute. Many accounts claim he was taken from his New York City apartment by NKVD agents (preceding the KGB), taken back to the Soviet Union and made to work in a sharashka laboratory prison camp at Magadan, Siberia. He reappeared 30 years later. In his 2000 biography of the inventor, Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage, Albert Glinsky suggested he had fled to escape crushing personal debts, and was then caught up in Stalin's political purges. In any case, Theremin did not return to the United States until 1991.>>

[mattrusso]

Is there anything standardized about this or is it just whatever they decide they want it to be? I realize that it's mostly for fun and listening to it is interesting. I followed the link about sonification and they used different sounds for the Milky Way. Is this like when NASA converted the data from the planets into creepy sounds? I've played those for my classes around Halloween before.

Yes, the sonification link was more specific about how they mapped the image to sounds, and the x-ray/visible/composite differences were interesting.

I'll bet it doesn't really matter at what angle the scanning line is at: vertical, horizontal, 45 degrees, or any other angle, probably sound equally "interesting". I suppose you could even use a non-straight line for other effects.

That's right. This is one of the more common techniques, especially for making images accessible to people with vision loss. People usually scan left-right or bottom-top. We chose left-right because it helped distinguish the 3 pillars and has the added bonus of letting us use stereo position as an additional cue. The goal was to communicate the structure of the pillars through sound and we did a bit of visual and audio processing to bring it out. We used different (but related) techniques for the Milky Way core since the key information we were trying to convey was different. You can think of the different techniques like different types of graphs, sometimes you have many options but some will make the important information more transparent than others.

[De58te]

My question, how can the scientists be sure that that is the sound the pillars actually make? I notice that the pitch is associated the same way that my audio equipment draws the sound graph. The highest notes are at the top and the lowest notes at the bottom. The question is do we have positioned the picture of the pillars the right way up? Traditionally with Earth maps North is always up. But how do we know that the rest of the Universe assigns up in the same position? Suppose that we took the picture of the pillars from Antarctica instead of from the Kennedy Space Centre? Wouldn't the pillars actually be upside down? The high notes as seen in today's Apod would be at the bottom. The sound then would be somewhat different.

[johnnydeep]

Is there anything standardized about this or is it just whatever they decide they want it to be? I realize that it's mostly for fun and listening to it is interesting. I followed the link about sonification and they used different sounds for the Milky Way. Is this like when NASA converted the data from the planets into creepy sounds? I've played those for my classes around Halloween before.

Yes, the sonification link was more specific about how they mapped the image to sounds, and the x-ray/visible/composite differences were interesting.

I'll bet it doesn't really matter at what angle the scanning line is at: vertical, horizontal, 45 degrees, or any other angle, probably sound equally "interesting". I suppose you could even use a non-straight line for other effects.

That's right. This is one of the more common techniques, especially for making images accessible to people with vision loss. People usually scan left-right or bottom-top. We chose left-right because it helped distinguish the 3 pillars and has the added bonus of letting us use stereo position as an additional cue. The goal was to communicate the structure of the pillars through sound and we did a bit of visual and audio processing to bring it out. We used different (but related) techniques for the Milky Way core since the key information we were trying to convey was different. You can think of the different techniques like different types of graphs, sometimes you have many options but some will make the important information more transparent than others.

Thanks for that! But what do you mean by “stereo position”? Is there something from the raw data that you use to determine whether to put the sound in the left or right channel?

[mattrusso]

Yes, the sonification link was more specific about how they mapped the image to sounds, and the x-ray/visible/composite differences were interesting.

I'll bet it doesn't really matter at what angle the scanning line is at: vertical, horizontal, 45 degrees, or any other angle, probably sound equally "interesting". I suppose you could even use a non-straight line for other effects.

That's right. This is one of the more common techniques, especially for making images accessible to people with vision loss. People usually scan left-right or bottom-top. We chose left-right because it helped distinguish the 3 pillars and has the added bonus of letting us use stereo position as an additional cue. The goal was to communicate the structure of the pillars through sound and we did a bit of visual and audio processing to bring it out. We used different (but related) techniques for the Milky Way core since the key information we were trying to convey was different. You can think of the different techniques like different types of graphs, sometimes you have many options but some will make the important information more transparent than others.

Thanks for that! But what do you mean by “stereo position”? Is there something from the raw data that you use to determine whether to put the sound in the left or right channel?

No, we just set it to follow the scanning line (moving from left to right) so that knowing which part of the image you're listening to is less dependent on being able to see the scanning line (which is clearly helpful for people who are blind).

[neufer]

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

[sym666]

Wasn't LV-426 located around zeta Reticuli?