‘Music is a way in, it’s a way to trigger people's emotional centers to get them engaged’ Matt Russo on the power of music to illuminate data and evoke interest.
Matt Russo is an astrophysicist, musician and sonification specialist. He teaches physics at the University of Toronto and has toured schools with sonifications that bring parts of the universe to life. He founded the sci-art project SYSTEM sounds, through which he works with NASA to sonify data collected in and about space.
In this episode of Research Comms Matt Russo talks about what sonification is, the skills required to create sonifications, his work engaging students with data about the universe through sonification, and the musical solar systems that Pythagoras and Kepler were looking for.
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The below is a short excerpt. For the full interview download the podcast.
I wonder if there's any particular project that encapsulates what your sonification work is all about?
The best example of the power and and potential of sonification in astronomy is when you sonify planetary orbits, because in that case there are real rhythms and harmonies in solar systems. Some solar systems are tuned into harmony and to fixed, repeating rhythms, and others are not, they are just different planet orbits and have nothing to do with each other. And so by converting the orbital motion into sound waves and rhythms and harmonies, you can immediately hear which solar systems are working together harmoniously in a stable pattern and which are just in their own orbits, not interacting with each other.
It's such a natural idea, it goes back over 2000 years to people like Pythagoras. This is the Music of the Spheres idea. And in recent decades, we've discovered thousands and thousands of exoplanets, and so we're really finding examples of what people like Pythagoras and Kepler were hoping to find in our solar system. We're finding real musical solar systems, even though ours is not quite musical.
My sonifications are mainly geared towards engagement and outreach, so I'm trying to use sonification to reach people and to form an emotional connection between them and something that's very foreign from everyday experience. In terms of a distant solar system or something never conceived of before, the music is a way in, it’s a way to trigger people's emotional centers to get them engaged. And then hopefully if it goes well, they'll learn something about the system and they'll be inspired to learn more through other means about the system or the functioning of something in our universe.
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What are the gateways to entry for sonification?
It's surprisingly easy to get into sonification. It may look complex but right now there are many web-based tools where you can just pick any image. And it'll be set up to sonify it, and you can change many parameters or you can upload any kind of data in a regular excel document, and it'll give you dials to control how that's mapped to things. So there are tools like that available that don't require any coding or any audio production knowledge.
The way I do it is with coding in Python language, and if you have any familiarity with basic coding in any language, it's actually not very hard to to load in data, and map them to musical pitches. But one of the hurdles is that it's easier to to make sounds out of data than it is to make an emotional experience with music so a musical background really adds a lot.
If you have understanding of music or musical harmony and theory, or even just if you play an instrument yourself and have an intuitive understanding of music, that goes a long way. And that's missing from a lot of sonification.
Is there a large sonification community, sharing resources and tools?
That's what we're working on now. There's a new archive that popped up - a sonification archive - which is attempting to just collect different examples into a centralized place. There is a lot of research being done on this, and there has been for decades. But the problem in sonification is it seems to be harder to standardize than visualizations.
Everyone learns how to interpret a graph in grade school. And there's clear conventions for how to interpret graphs, vertical data and horizontal data. And that's that education and practice that isn't happening with sonification. One struggle with sonification is you have to explain from scratch what everything means and what all the mappings are. And I'm not sure how much that can be overcome, but we don't really know yet because people haven't been trained on a mass scale in interpreting sonification.
Presumably the sonification approach to data interpretation and sharing of data could be applied to any kind of discipline or science?
Yeah, there's a huge outbreak now on tick tock of mushroom sonification, it's called bio data sonification. They hook up sensors to to fungi and use that to control musical parameters. I've heard several sonifications of the COVID epidemic and the COVID genome, the DNA of the COVID virus. It's a tool, just like visualization. I like to think that they're very similar. You can have data, you can visualize it in certain ways and you can sonify in certain ways. And hopefully you've picked the right tool for the job.
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