New NASA Black Hole Sonifications with a Remix | Hacker News Reader

New NASA Black Hole Sonifications with a Remix

nasa.gov

22 pointssigna1121 comments

It really bothers me that NASA releases these along with text that implies that there is a "popular misconception that there is no sound in space" when that is in fact true. They are mapping visual data about gas density to audio tones and pretending that is what you would hear if your ear was situated there. It's not even the correct mapping (radial and not radiating pressure waves) for what a layperson would call "sound". It's just a very fancy music box... which is very nice but we don't claim that a music box is somehow listening to the sound of steel atoms.

I've seen this all over twitter and, while it's very popular and very pretty, I think the description of it does the public a disservice bordering on the propagation of pseudoscience. This article at least correctly calls it a "sonification" which is a nice corollary to "visualization" and does describe what is actually going on.

> They are mapping visual data about gas density

Is X-ray data visual data?

I suppose it is... but my understanding of this is the data comes from ripples in the gas. So it's not that removed from sound waves? I mean, sound needs a medium, and if we can measure the ripples in the medium we more or less have something approaching a sonic representation, or "sounds of space".

I'm all for this sort of marketing. NASA needs popularity because it drives funding. Most people don't understand sound like you do, so they wouldn't understand the truth anyway. It's not that most people are too dumb or uneducated, it's that they don't really care to know. However those same people get a sense of connection to space exploration by hearing something like this. If that connection comes from a slightly misleading over simplification but drives NASA funding then I'm all for it.

My wife used to work in communications within a university. I got to witness how that worked. She would interview academics about their research. She and most of the population don't have enough background to understand the research so they would have to come up with some kind of approximation to write about. I'm sure to the researchers it was absurd and misleading but it gave the lay person a window into what was going on. I suspect that is how the text on that article came to be. I think it was written by someone who's job is to simplify things, things they might not understand themself.

You're all for lying to people to get their attention? This is a bad and self-defeating strategy because you will lose legitimacy.

Is it really a lie? It's an approximation to something real happening. You might as well call the JWST pics of jupiter a lie because humans blatantly can't see it with their own eyes.

I don't mind a false color image and they're clearly labeled as such, but the sonification description was flat out wrong and it's not the first time. At best the PR people really don't understand what they're looking at, but the people doing the spectral analysis do, and they oughta know better.

Exactly. If false color images aren't labeled/described as so, then they're just as bad as the sonification situation. Stop telling people falsities about space, when using a couple extra sentences will describe it in plenty of detail. If people choose not to read it, that's on them for being lazy or ignorant. Not on you for lying.

But people actually believe it - my wife showed me one of these articles just yesterday, and was exclaiming that sound really does travel in space, because that's what the title said.

NASA marketing itself is fine, misleading people, creating whole new myths, is not.

To be clear, I love the project and think sonification can be useful… just don’t pitch it with an outright lie. A microphone in space will hear nothing. That is true. Even if a microphone could travel through that particular gas cloud at speed, the sound it would generate wouldn’t be anything like that. Its not a simplification of any real phenomenon, it’s purely a (very interesting) theoretical mapping of data to sound.

Getting funding is a means not an end.

It's required for space exploration. That's what I'm excited about.

I'm really irritated about this. I was looking forward to a longitudinal observation of a gas cloud and some clever math to extract sonic information from it's vibrations. Instead it's just an FFT of an image. What upsets me is that they're bullshitting the public for clicks, and then they wonder why it's hard to get funding for science.

Stop bullshitting people. It degrades science.

Direct URL: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/news/new-nasa-bla...

Tantacrul has a typically incisive video [1] about the real potential of sonification as a powerful technique for understanding data, and its real artistic possibilities, vs the dishonest and arbitrary way it gets used to generate publicity.

[1] https://youtu.be/Ocq3NeudsVk

My impression is that this is a completely arbitrary signal run through a filter which shifts it to the lower end of the audible spectrum. You might as well take 20ms of the Macarena and slow them down 100x, to the same effect.

Pure meaningless clickbait. I agree with others saying that NASA shouldn't be doing this.

It sounds like hundreds of tortured souls being dragged underneath a lake of fire

That's what Disney depicted in The Black Hole movie from 1979.

And then there's 1997's "Event Horizon" starring Laurence Fishburne which featured similar imagery.

lol. How do you really feel about it?

And now I'm thinking of the myths about playing Heavy Metal vinyls and tapes backwards.

A picture of seagull droppings makes noise if you make it make noise

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