Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

January 27, 2014

NASA’s Voyager Data Is Now a Musical

Filed under: Music,Sonification,Sound — Patrick Durusau @ 5:01 pm

NASA’s Voyager Data Is Now a Musical by Victoria Turk.

From the post:

You might think that big data would sound like so many binary beeps, but a project manager at Géant in the UK has turned 320,000 measurements from NASA Voyager equipment into a classically-inspired track. The company describes it as “an up-tempo string and piano orchestral piece.”

Domenico Vicinanza, who is a trained musician as well as a physicist, took measurements from the cosmic ray detectors on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 at hour intervals, and converted it into two melodies. The result is a duet: the data sets from the two spacecraft play off each other throughout to create a rather charming harmony. …

Data sonification, the technique of representing data points with sound, makes it easier to spot trends, peaks, patterns, and anomalies in a huge data set without having to pore over the numbers.

Some data sonification resources:

audiolyzR: Data sonification with R

Georgia Tech Sonification Lab

Sonification Sandbox

Sonification.de

I suspect that sonification is a much better way to review monotonous data for any unusual entries.

My noticing an OMB calculation that multiplied a budget item by zero (0) and produced a larger number, was just chance. Had math operations been set to music, I am sure that would have struck a discordant note!

Human eyesight is superior to computers for galaxy classification.

Human hearing as superior way to explore massive datasets is a promising avenue of research.

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