Data Sonification
Many scientists collect very large amounts of data, and it becomes challenging to come up with good ways to perceive these data sets at times. I became interested in data sonification, the conversion of data to sound, because I was collecting large amounts of data from fish otoliths. If I run a laser transect across an otolith and collect data on half a dozen or so different elements, sometimes those data sets can run into the thousands of points. I thought it might be interesting to sonify some data and see what that was like.
I read an article a while back in Smithsonian Magazine about a young astrophysicist who went blind, and when she did, her team created a program to sonify data. Now she is a highly successful scientist in her own right, and she inspires many other disabled people to pursue careers in science. Check out her TED talk.
Amazingly, I was able to get in touch with this scientist when she was a post-doc at Harvard. She and her NASA colleagues helped me to download their Java app, which is called XSonify, and I have been fiddling around with it from time to time. I've definitely only scratched the surface.
To learn more about data sonification, check out this link at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. It contains links to other resources, including to where you can download XSonify (note that you have to have a compatible version of Java on your computer).
I decided to try this myself, on a data set from a Baltic flounder (Platichthys flesus). These fish display a lot of seasonality in their otolith chemistry, and they also often have quite high concentrations of some elements in the core region, which is deposited during early life. I made a video of playing two of the elemental ratios: Mg/Ca and Mn/Ca. I log-transformed the latter to hear it better against the Mg/Ca.
Sonified Baltic flounder MgCa and MnCa.MOV
The video is a little clumsy (first attempt). I chose to play the Mg/Ca with a synthesized trumpet - it's the "darker" of the two sounds. The ln(Mn/Ca) is played with a synthesized piccolo - it's a brighter sound. The video runs 48 seconds.