MagSonify

MagSonify is a tool I built in the summer of 2021 as part of a research internship.

It allows for the generation of audio which represents the oscillations of plasma waves in Earth's magnetosphere, as detected by the THEMIS satellite. This conversion, a technique called audification has been innovated as a means of getting an overview of large datasets in various scientific fields. When the data is presented in such a format, it is possible for us to process it intuitively to a degree which is not possible for waveforms rendered on a screen.

The main challenge that I worked on was the need to implement various time stretching methods during the audification process. These are needed in order to make the audio slow enough for the listener to be able to pick up on meaningful events. Each time stretching algorithm introduces different distortions to the audio, which we wanted to examine.

This work ultimately contributed to a publication in Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Science and to further work by my supervisor and other collaborators, including a planned citizen science project.

Publication: Listening to the Magnetosphere: How Best to Make ULF Waves Audible

Full project documentation (readthedocs.io)

The research collaboration I was working with ultimately intended to create an application which would allow citizen scientists to listen to the audio for a given space weather event or time period and would render the accompanying waveforms and satellite position. The following videos show a mock of part of this interface and exhibit what the audified plasma waves sound like under different algorithms.