Science Friday - Accessible Birding, Space Sounds, Wasps. July 7, 2023. Part 2

Episode Date: July 7, 2023

Meet The Blind Birder Reimagining Accessibility In The Outdoors For many blind and low vision people, accessing outdoor spaces like parks can be challenging. Trails are often unsafe or difficult to navigate, signs don’t usually have Braille, guides generally aren’t trained to help disabled visitors, and so on. But nature recordist Juan Pablo Culasso, based in Bogata, Colombia, is changing that. He’s designed a system of fully accessible trails in the cloud forests of southwest Colombia that are specifically tailored to help visually disabled people connect with nature. The trails are the first of their kind in the Americas, and Culasso drew on his own experiences as a blind person and a professional birder to design the system. He talks with Maddie Sofia about how he designed the trail system and takes listeners on an adventure through the cloud forest he works in.   Listen To Ethereal Sounds Derived From Space You’ve probably heard that if you scream in space, no one will hear a thing. Space is a vacuum, so sound waves don’t have anything to bounce off of. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that space is silent. A team of researchers are taking data from a variety of telescopes and assigning them sounds, creating song-length sonifications of beloved space structures like black holes, nebulas, galaxies, and beyond. The album, called “Universal Harmonies” aims to bring galaxies to life and allow more people, such as those who are blind and low-vision, to engage with outer space. Guest host Flora Lichtman talks with two of the scientists behind “Universal Harmonies,” Dr. Kimberly Arcand, visualization scientist at NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, and Dr. Matt Russo, astrophysicist and musician at the University of Toronto. Listen to a selection of the ethereal sonifications of “Universal Harmonies.”   Why You Should Thank Your Local Wasp It’s late in the summer, meaning any outdoor gathering with food and drink has a good chance of being visited by a pesky, buzzing wasp. But don’t reach for that rolled-up newspaper or can of bug spray. The wasps in your world play an important role that’s often overlooked. Far beyond the social hornets and yellowjackets people think about when they picture a wasp, the wasp world includes thousands of species. Some are parasitic, injecting their eggs into unwilling prey. Others hunt, either paralyzing prey for their young to feed on, or by bringing bits of meat back to a nest for their young. Some are strictly vegetarian, and live on pollen. Some are needed for the pollination of figs and certain species of orchids. Dr. Seirian Sumner, a behavioral biologist at University College London, says that if people understood the services provided by wasps the same way that they understand the need for bees, they might be more willing to overlook an occasional wasp annoyance—and might even be thankful for the wasps in their lives. In her book, "Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps," Sumner makes the case for wasps as nature’s pest control agents, as important pollinators that should be celebrated. And the pesky yellowjacket at your picnic? It’s probably being driven by a late-summer shift in functions within the nest, in which many of the workers die off and are replaced by sexual brood. Earlier in the year, worker wasps can bring bits of meat to the developing young, which reward them with sugary secretions. But later in the season, that food source dries up—so visiting wasps are probably searching for a bit of sugar just to get by. “Watch the wasp, see what she wants at your picnic,” Sumner advises. “Is she going for sugar, or is she going for some meat? Whatever you can work out that she wants, give her a little bit of it. Make a little wasp offering.” Sumner joins SciFri producer Charles Bergquist to talk about wasps, and make a case for why you should be thankful for the wasps in your neighborhood.   To stay updated on all-things-science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters. Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Charles Bergquist. And I'm Maddie Safaya. Later in the hour, we'll listen to the sounds of our universe with some sonification of astronomy data. And we'll tell you why you should thank your local wasp. But first, we're headed into the cloud forests of Southwest Columbia, way high up in the Andes. To visit a set of trails that are the first of their kind in the Americas, they are designed specifically with blind and low-vision visitors in the United States. They are designed specifically with blind and low-vision visitors in the Andes. mind. For many visually disabled people, accessing outdoor spaces like parks can be challenging.

Trails are often unsafe or difficult to navigate, signs don't usually have braille, and guides generally aren't trained to help disabled visitors. My next guest, Juan Pablo Colaso, is working to change that. He's drawn on his own experiences as a blind person and expert birder to develop a system of accessible trails. He's also an audio nerd after our own hearts recording hours and hours of natural sound. Juan is joining us today from Bogota, Colombia. Juan Pablo, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you, Madi.

Juan Pablo, I've heard that you can identify more than 1,000 species of birds by sound. My first question is how, Juan? Like, how does one learn to differ at you? Okay. Well, usually blind people, we need to develop. some memories techniques right we need to do mental maps every day to locate objects to locate everything and our world is is built by sounds everything of my images are sounds well the birds i believe that wasn't really a coincidence because when i was child you know make games to a child today

you put a playstation or whatever but for a blind person for a blind child is so hard and with my father and an encyclopedia that had different birds sounds. Basically, Europeans and North American birds, he began to play randomly a sound, and I need to set the answer. And then I received a cassette tape in the 90s, 1998 baby, with birds of Argentina. And my country, Uruguay and Argentina, shares 100% of the birds. So after that cassette, when we traveled to the field, I began to recognize, wow, this is the bird number one in the site B. Or this is the bird, yeah, bird 25 or 26 or whatever.

And then the jump to the professional path was when I was 16 years old. I was invited to an expedition with biologist. And one of them gave me a recorder, a microphone. And when you listen the sound louder into the headphones, just hit the rack button. And listening to a bird, that kingfisher really changed my mind. Well, after 20 years, I'm so grateful for the biologist that gave me the equipment, the recorder. I love that it's a kingfisher. That's my belted kingfisher.

That's my favorite bird. Oh, really? It's so beautiful. Yeah. Wow, like a celebrity bird. Okay. So I'm wondering, you become, you know, a professional in this space. You spent your childhood falling in love and listening to these birds and making games out of it.

When did you get the idea to design accessible trails? Matt, this is a beautiful question, because I did myself the same question. Juan Pablo, what can I do for the other blind people that can't go outside to nature? Because I'm a privileged person because I could travel mostly in the Americas but in other parts of the world as well. Recording sounds and making workshops and making conferences to sighted people. But what can I do for the other blind people? So in the 2020, in the middle of COVID-19 pandemic situation, I moved to Bogota two weeks after the world closes with my girlfriend, appear an application of a grant to develop our grant projects regarding reactivating tourism post-COVID-19.

And we applied to that project with the first Abitourism route for blind people in South America. My idea is not make a thing only for blind people or partial-sided people. Because in my opinion, this is not inclusion. It's exclusion. My idea is all people together getting an experience in the forest. Because I know that it's possible to blind people go to nature. Wow. Okay. So walk me through some of the features that make it accessible. Like there's audio guides associated with them. Like, take me for a walk. Okay. Okay.

Okay, Madie, you are in the beginning of the trail. On your right hand, there is a rope, and I invite you to close your eyes and walk slowly using that rope. You're going to encounter some signals in the rope, like different textures, that are advising you that a couple of steps in front of view. There is a QR code. You're going to get your phone. you're going to scan that QR code and that QR code will have the description of the place that you are, what trees are, what kind of birds, the description of the path, for example. Be careful on the next steps, there are a climb down.

So walk slowly, right? Right. You continue walking and another QR code. So drop the rope. extend your right hand and you are going to touch a tree. That tree is called whatever. This tree is so important to this forest regarding they get a lot of water inside. Okay, you return to the rope and continue walking.

And in the end of the trail, there is a platform, fenced platform, that we are going to meet all together and share the experience. Wow. I love this. It's so immersive. Yes, absolutely. The other thing, Juan Pablo, is there are people there to help, right? There are guides that are specially trained.

Exactly. What do they do differently than, you know, conventionally trained guides? Believe me that all the trainings that I do, 80% I need to train the people to train their common sense. Right? Yeah. Basically. When you break the eyes with a blind people, you know, so many people get scary. What's going to say to them?

what words can I use? Yeah. Right. So, yeah, the guys are trained to really don't be scary about the blind person. Don't be scary to say something. The techniques, I need to train the persons to really be descriptive, but at the same time, really use the appropriate words to describe something. Right. For example, the colors, the colors of the, because so many people think that blind people doesn't know nothing about colors, but it's not true. But you can use associations, for example, ah, that, I don't know, that tree is red, red, red like the fire or whatever.

Blue like the sky, right? Specific techniques to really, for example, 99% of the people when try to guide me in a place, take my hand and this is a mistake because my hands are my eyes you know sure you need to take my arm to be my hands free to really navigate and understand but you never take a blind person from from their hands sorry so that's the idea well let's let's do it let's pretend you're my guide I have some audio that you graciously gave us I'm going to close my eyes you describe to me where we are, you know, what we're hearing. You know, just take me on a little tour, Juan Pablo. Okay, you, Madi, are in a forest.

It's after raining. The drops that you are listening are the water that are in the trees that are falling gently onto the floor. No rain. The rain already passes. And now you are listening a beautiful couple of meotlipis, Coronata. That birds are very, very small birds of the family of warblers.

They are so common in the cloud forest in Colombia. Wow, okay, I love that. Juan Pablo, how hard would this be for other parks to adopt some of these changes? Because it doesn't seem tremendously difficult to me. All the people ask me, Juan Pablo, how many money I need to invest? It's not too much. The money, in my opinion, is the easiest part. The hardest part is the change of the mental thing that most people said, no, I don't receive buying people.

And they said that because it's so hard to think. It's so hard to sing, how can I do or how many things I need to adapt or how many people I need to train. The first thing is really find people with an open mind. They need to believe the nature is a human right. Nature is a human right. And even more for blind people, even more from blind people. We want to travel a lot. We want to enjoy different things.

But it's really, really hard because the most people that is in that places, they prefer to say, no, this place is unsafe. You are going to fall. You cannot. You can't do that. It's easy, Maddie. It's easy. So the change of the attitude of the person is the key.

Yeah, that's the hard part. Yeah. I mean, what has been the reaction from people who visit these trails? You know, what are you hearing from people? Well, the first pilot that we did was with children with death and blind disabilities. And for 90% of that, even living 40 minutes away from that beautiful place, so many of they really cry a lot after the experience. Because no before they could do that. For me, really was really emotionally, was so strong.

So I remember that I talked to my guide. I said for him, Luis Carlos, please. take me away from here to cry a little bit because it's a dream come true, right? So finally, people with my same disability in the case of blind are enjoying the same thing that I really enjoy for the last 20 years. Juan Pablo, that is beautiful. Thank you so much for joining me and taking me on a journey. I had so much fun. I'm so happy to be here and if I'm allowed to, Please find me in Spotify to listen more beautiful nature songs in South America.

We do have a link to your recordings on our website if the audience wants to hear more. Juan Pablo Coulassso is a nature recordist and birder based in Bogota, Columbia. Thanks, Maddie. After the break, a look at a sometime, summertime nuisance, wasps, and why you shouldn't be so quick to reach for the fly swatter. This is Science Friday. I'm Charles Bergquist. Did your Fourth of July celebration include a picnic dinner or a cookout? There's a chance you had some guests that weren't on the invite list. Wasps.

Perhaps they were trying to sneak a sip of your drink or sample the fruit salad. But before you reach for the rolled-up newspaper or the can of bug spray, my next guest says that you should be thankful for the wasps in your life. They're really doing a lot for you. In fact, she calls wasps nature's pest control agents. If you want to protect the clothes in your closet, without them smelling like mothballs, there's a wasp for that. And I was surprised to learn that there are even factories that read thousands upon thousands of wasps for agricultural use.

I spoke with Sarian Sumner, Professor of Behavioral Ecology at University College London, and author of the book Endless Forms, The Secret World of Wasps. And I started by asking her where wasps fit on the evolutionary tree. Well, actually, everything is a wasp. That's what I'd like to start with this. So the hymenoptera encompasses the wasps, bees and ants. But the wasps are root of all of those. So bees are wasps that have forgotten how to hunt because most wasps are hunters.

And ants are just wasps that have lost the ability to fly, at least, and most of their life cycle. It's only the sexuals that fly. So everything is a wasp, really. So I kind of feel that the wasps, which are generally overlooked, and everybody applauds the bees and the ants, says, well, actually, there would be no bees or ants if it weren't for the wasps. So all the things that we call yellow jackets, hornets, any of these specific things where you see them and say, ooh, there's a flying stingy thing, they're all wasps. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

So, but there are many different kinds of wasps. Most people think of wasps as the yellow jacket and the hornet, as you've just mentioned. mentioned, and those are social wasps. And actually, social wasps represent a very small proportion of the total number of wasp species that have been described. There's over 100,000 species of wasps that have been described, and yet there's only about 1,500 species of social wasps. And in fact, the yellow jackets that come to visit you at your picnics, even across the entire world, there are only about 70 species of those vestbines, the yellow jackets and the hornets. So actually the social wasps that we encounter and we think of as wasps and we identify that kind of yellow and black striped,

buzzy thing at picnics, they are a tiny, tiny proportion of what wasps are. Most wasps don't stink, actually. They are parasitoid wasps which lay their eggs in or on other organisms like a caterpillar or a beetle larva. And they don't have stings. They have a long egg laying sheets called the ovipositor, which they will use to lay the egg in their prey, they won't move the prey. They'll basically find the caterpillar that's buried in under some bark or something. They'll lay the egg and then they'll leave and that's it. There's no more parental care. But it's the hunting wasps, the stinging wasps that we think of as being,

and we recognise as being a wasp. And there are only about 33,000 species of those. I say only, actually, let's get that introspective because there are only 22,000 species of bees. And yet people think that bees are amazing and so diverse and incredible. Well, there are at least 30,000. 3,000 species of stinging wasps. So the scales need to be balanced up here. So it feels like my local wasps sort of change their behavior over the course of the summer. Tell me about the life cycle. What are my local wasps likely to be doing? Yeah. So your local wasps, I guess we're talking about your yellow jacket wasps. They will have come out in the early spring and the queens, the mated queens,

who'd hibernated, will have built their own nest on their own, and they will have done all the nest buildings, they collect wood from your garden benches, your sheds, your fences, bits of dead wood, and they will mix it with saliva and they'll spread it out into this beautiful, thin, papery material and they'll start to build what will be an incredible citadel by the end of the summer. And the first brood that are reared will then be the workers. And once the workers have emerged as adults, they're all her daughters, and they will then be the foragers and the nest builders and the maintenance staff. And the queen herself will never leave the nest again. And so the nest grows exponentially over the summer. And then as you get towards the end of the summer,

the early autumn, then things do start to change. And the main thing that changes is that the queen starts laying sexual brood. So she'll be laying what will be next year's queens and also the males, which will mate with queens from other nest. And the workers, she'll stop producing quite so many workers and the nest kind of moves into a sort of reproductive mode. And this is also the time when lots of the larvae start to pupate. So actually I should say, even though these wasps are hunters, the adults are actually vegetarians. It's the larva, which are the carnivals, so the babies and the meat eaters. And so the wasps that you see at your picnics and barbecues will be catching the prey or a bit of your sausage. They're quite happy with a bit of carrion. And they'll bring

it back to the nest, they'll feed it to the larvae, and the larvae will often reward the worker with a sugary excretion from its mouth, we call it trophylaxis, and this contains a lot of nutrition for the adult wasps. And so that kind of keeps them going during the most of the summer. But when the larvae start pupating, there's less need for hunting by the workers, and there's also less nutrition provided to the workers by the larvae. And so what that means is that we start to get wasps, bothering us a bit more at our private spaces, our picnics, our patios, our barbecues. And the reason is that they're looking for sugar because they're no longer getting it from the colony. And ordinarily, they would go and visit some flowers because wasps pollinate as well.

And they will get nectar from flowers. But your beer, your prosceco, your sugary drinks are just as good a source of sugar as anything. And that's why we start to encounter them a lot more towards the end of the summer because they've basically been furloughed from their kind of hunting tasks into, they're still doing a bit of hunting, but they're just, you know, there's still thousands of wasps alive that are trying to sustain themselves. And then ultimately, all the workers will die at the end of the autumn, the first frost or so. The sexual brood, so that's the new queens and the males will have gone off from mated. The males all die. As soon as they've done their bits and mating, they die. and then the mated queens go into hibernation in your shed or your attic until the following season.

But the entire nest will cease to exist. The old queen dies. Everybody dies. So if you've got a big papery nest in your loft or your shed, don't worry. You'll be gone by the end of the autumn. Interesting. Let's talk about the PR aspect. I guess wasps have a bad reputation as being somehow meaner than bees.

Is that accurate? or is this just, they have a bad publicist? I think you're absolutely right. They do definitely need a PR makeover. They get their bad reputation from this end of summer misdemeanors that they cause us at our picnics. And so that really gives them a bad reputation. And it's only at that time when people start to notice them

and then they start to swat at them and they get stung and then they go, what's the point of wasps? They're only here to bother us. And people don't really have a good understanding of what wasps do. And I think the stark contrast with the bees is incredible because the bees have, we have done such a good job in educating the public in terms of what bees do. Most people understand that bees are pollinators and that they do a really important service in both our farmed ecosystems, our natural ecosystems, our gardens and where would we be without bees? And therefore we tolerate the fact that we sometimes get stung by bees.

Whereas wasps, without that kind of body of understanding amongst people, the public and even the scientists, about what wasps do and why they matter, we just don't want to tolerate the fact that they get a bit pesky at a very small time of year. So wasps are nature's pest controllers. They are regulating the insect populations in your garden, in your local park, in your farm field, in your forest. And so in a world without wasps, we would have a lot of other insects that we possibly find almost as irritating as wasps are, and that we would have to use more chemicals to control them. So we should be really celebrating the wasp and thanking them for the services that they provide us with. So you've mentioned their utility as a pest control agent, but talk to me a little bit more about their pollination aspects. Are there specific plants that if we didn't have the wasps, we wouldn't have,

whatever this plant is? Yeah, so wasps as pollinators is almost entirely unstudied except for a few specialist groups who, as you say, are the only things that pollinate these particular plants. So figs is a really good example. So some species of figs have a mutualism with fig wasps. These are tiny little wasps whose life cycle pretty much depends on the fig, apart from dispersal from one fig to another.

So what happens is this tiny little wasp, a female who's mated and she's covered in pollen from the fig that she's hatched from, she will bury into a fig fruit and she'll spread the pollen around inside the fruit and then she'll also lay lots of eggs and then she'll die. And lots of people say to me, oh no, our fig's actually vegetarian friendly because you're eating wasps. And the truth is that you're not eating wasp. You'd be very unlucky if you ended up eating wasps by eating figs because figs produce an enzyme called fiking, which breaks down the bodies of the dead wasps.

So there are no dead wasps inside your fakes. But anyway, then the eggs hatch, and of course they're all the offspring from a single female, so they're brothers and sisters. The brothers mate with the sisters. It's all very lovely. And then the mated sisters then kind of jump around the fruit, covering themselves in pot.

and then they will exit the fruit through a little exit entrance that their brothers have kindly dug for them. And the males never leave the fruit. They just die inside the fruit. And then those mated pollen-covered females will then move on to another fruit. And so bringing the pollen from one fruit to another, which of course is what pollination is. So that's a really well-studied system. And there's over 900 species of fig wasps. And they were fought actually until quite recently to be quite faithful to particular species of figs. But actually, more recently, genomic analyses have shown that it's a much messier picture

and there's a bit more of crossover and a bit more infidelity than we thought there was. So the fig wasps are a great example of wasp pollination. The other really good example of wasps as essential pollinators is for orchids. So there are some orchids that mimic a female wasp. So they smell like a female wasp, they look like one, they even feel like one. And so male wasp, male thinnidye wasps get attracted to these gorgeously sexy flowers.

And they try and mate with them very vigorously. And in the process, they get dollops of pollen stuck on their back by the flower, which has evolved to be not only mimicking the female wasps, but also be really efficient at depositing a package of pollen onto the wasp. And then the male just goes on. his way to the next flower, which he also thinks is another female. And he's oblivious to the fact that he's mating with flowers, not females, and he's carrying pollen from flower to flower.

So unlike the fig wasps story, which is a beautiful story of co-evolution, where both the plants and the insect benefit, in the case of the orchids, the orchids are completely manipulating the wasps, and the wasps get nothing out of it at all. But apart from those two examples, there is another group of wasps actually who are actually called the pollen wasps, the Masary. And they're so understudied.

There's a group in South Africa who study them. They're actually found all over the US, you lucky people, and yet hardly anyone has studied them. So if there are any listens out there looking for a research project, then the pollen wasps is definitely something that should be researched more. And what's fascinating about the pollen wasps is that, as the name suggests, they don't hunt prey. They collect pollen instead, just like a bee,

and they will use it then to provision their cells, which will then lay eggs in and their offspring will feed off the pollen in the same way that a bee larva does. So they are remarkable. It's like a parallel form of vegetarianism alongside the bees amongst the wasps. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I'm talking with Professor Sarian Sumner about the secret world of wasps.

Do you have a favorite pet species? I do. I always get asked this. People normally say, oh, I'm sure it's a really hard question. You can't possibly have a favorite. But yes, I do have a favorite. My favorite wasp is Pylistis Canidensis, which is found in the neotropic, so in sort of Panama and south of Panama. And the reason it's my favorite species is that I studied it for many years. It's quite a big wasp.

It's about two centimeters long, has a big sting. It hurts quite a lot. But fascinating social behavior. And it was also the first hunting wasp to have its genome sequence. So we're quite proud of that. For people who have listened to all of this and still aren't quite sold on the wonderful world of wasps, what tips do you have? for people to coexist, at least, with wasps. Yeah, that's a really good question, because, you know, even I don't like,

I don't like getting stung by a wasp, nobody likes to get stung. And it is inevitable. It's an inevitability of summer that wasps will visit you at your picnic. And so what I try to get my family and friends to do is when a wasp comes along to visit you at your picnic, check out what she's doing. Don't flap around because flapping and shouting at her, will basically make her think you are a predator. Because certainly in the UK,

the main predator of yellow jacket wasps are badgers. And the way that they predate on the wasps is that they will dig them up from the ground. So there's lots of flailing limbs and the badgers breathing heavily in the nest. It's carbon dioxide. So you flailing your arms around at the wasp and breathing over it, shouting, obscene words at it.

It's only going to make them think that you are a badger. and that you are going to be attacking them, so they will attack you. So just watch the wasp. See what she wants at your picnic. Is she going for sugar or is she going for some meat? And then whatever you can work out that she wants, give her a little bit of it, make a little wasp offering. And there are people in parts of the world where wasps are an enormous nuisance,

where they're an invasive species. So, for example, the yellow jackets are invasive species in New Zealand, South Africa and parts of Latin America like Argentina. And what the people do there is they go out for a picnic and they'll bring along a wasp offering with them. So they'll bring along some really smelly bit of fish and they'll stick it 10 metres away from them and the wasps will go to that bit of fish

and they'll leave them alone. So I think we need to be learning from this a bit more and learning to live well with wasps rather than trying to constantly be combating them because they're not going to go away, and we don't want them to go away because they are nature's pest controllers, and we should be valuing them and not hating them. This has been fascinating. Thank you so much for taking time to talk with me today. Oh, thank you so much for having me.

Sarian Sumner is a professor of behavioral ecology at University College London, an author of the book Endless Forms, The Secret World of Wasps. And you can read an excerpt from the book on our website at sciencefrily.com slash wasps. Coming up, Flora Lickman takes us to listen to the songs of our universe, how researchers turn data from black holes, exploding stars, galaxies and beyond, into sound. It's actually pretty straightforward to convert the motion of planets into musical rhythms and notes. When you do that, every solar system has its own beat and its own kind of harmony. So some are very pleasant and peaceful and others are a little more tense and disjointed.

There's everything out there. sonifying our cosmos after the break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Charles Bergquist. And I'm Flora Lichtman. Charles, I know you're into space stuff. True.

Do you have an extraterrestrial bucket list? Like, if you had James Webb's space telescope eyes and were not constrained by the laws of space and time, is there an outer space place you'd go see? Yeah, you know, I've always been a sucker for the classic spiral galaxies like M51A, the whirlpool. I am picturing a giant hot tub in the sky. Is that what it looks like?

I mean, it's kind of your classic textbook definition picture of what a galaxy looks like. But it's also this stunningly beautiful spiral of swirling stars up against pitch black space. Ooh, that sounds like a good destination. And I wish we could go see it, your giant space jacuzzi, but we can't. But guess what? We might be able to hear it. Do you want to guess what it sounds like? So on the one hand, I know that in space no one can hear you scream,

but on the other hand, I also somehow imagine all the gas and dust and stuff making kind of a wispy, woozy kind of like a shoo. Well, what have I told you it could sound something like this? That choral music sung by Trapped Ghosts is Whirlpool Galaxy M51A. Not literally. Like if you blast it off into space, you obviously wouldn't hear this. This sound is made by scientists taking real data and sonifying it, turning that data into sound. My next guests have transformed data from galaxies, black holes, nebulas, supernovas, you name it, into sound.

And they put it all together in a new album called Universal Harmonies. Dr. Kimberly Arcand is a visualization scientist at NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Dr. Matt Russo is an astrophysicist and musician at the University of Toronto. Both of you welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much. It's great to be here. Thanks for having us. Kim, why did you start turning space data into dulcet tunes? Where did this all begin? Well, for me, I've been working for NASA's Tandirx Conservatory for about 25 years, and I spent the first few years of my career just figuring out how to process, you know, this invisible kind of light, x-ray light, into something we can see. And then sort of quickly realized after a few years that that's leaving out a segment of the population.

Sonification is just this idea of translating information into sound. And this is part of NASA's sonification program? Like, why does NASA want to do this? Yeah. So for the most part, it was because we're really trying to make sure our data is accessible, right? there is this idea that when you've got all of this type of invisible light that you're working with, whether it's x-ray light or infrared light, we don't have to only prioritize the visual. We can use other senses to be able to explore it, to be able to learn from it, to be able to enjoy it. And so sonification in particular was a technique that I had learned about from a colleague, Dr. Wanda Diaz.

She's an astronomer and computer scientist who is blind and uses sonification to be able to understand stars. And so I reached out to Matt and his colleague Andrew, and we started working on a project to take Chandra data and other data sets that we had to translate them into something we could hear and experience in a new way. Matt, you're a musician and an astrophysicist. Is there a connection between the two? There is. And we're not the first to realize this is an extremely old idea. It goes back over 2,000 years to people like Pythagoras for centuries. it seemed almost obvious that there'd be some connection between the cyclical patterns in the universe and the cyclical patterns in music, and in particular the harmony of both. And it turns out

there is a lot of overlap because music and astronomy both have a lot to do with repeating cycles and listening or observing how those cycles interact with each other. I want to understand this better how these sonifications work. I mean, we know spaces of vacuum. and sound can't travel through it. So what are we hearing? So there's many different ways to do sonification. In some cases, you can simply take light data that's received. So for example, how bright a star is over time and convert that into a sound wave. But you can also take more artistic approaches and maybe convert the pixels in an image to different musical pitches to communicate that information through sound. So we're hearing maybe a translation of brightness or maybe a translation of actually pixels. Are any of your sonifications actual sound data that has been pitched into our hearing range?

Yes, there's one amazing example, and it's our sonification of the Perseus galaxy cluster. And that was an image taken with x-rays, but the image itself shows ripples, their actual sound waves traveling through gas and space that are launched by a supermassive black hole. And because the sound waves are visible in the image, we can extract their shape and re-synthesize them as a sound. That also involves changing the frequency of those sound waves by about seven or eight musical octaves. That's actually fewer octaves than I would have guessed. Actually, I misspoke. It's actually seven or eight actual full piano lengths. So 56 or 57 full octaves. Is that closer to your expectation? I don't even know. Maybe that's probably still fewer than I would have thought.

That's quite a lot. Yeah, 57 octaves means you're, you're doubling the frequency 57 times. So that's really an exponentially large change in frequency. So let's take a listen to the sonified Perseus cluster. So this is a huge collection of galaxies with a black hole right in its center. Kim, this sounds exactly like what I'd imagine a black hole to sound like. Absolutely terrifying. What are we hearing? We've heard that a lot. Yeah, a lot of people have said that.

We've heard people saying it sounds like a horror movie soundtrack or is like something Han Zimmer would write if he was working on like a tense piece of music. I think it really helps strike our imaginations. But this one's really exciting because this is one of my favorite data sets of all time. The science result for this came back, came out in 2000. some colleagues of mine, Dr. Andy Fabian and some of his colleagues were working on a study of the Perseus cluster of galaxies where this supermassive black hole is just burping out into the hot gas, creating these pressure waves. And they did the math to be able to find out that that was the deepest note in the universe being created, right? This diva out there singing this incredibly deep song.

And so when we started this sonification project, I was very excited to work on this one because it already had a sound, if you will, those sound waves in the image that we can hear. And so for this one, being able to actually translate that or re-synthesize it, you know, backup was very, very exciting for me because this is a data set I've stared at for a long time. And so to be able to hear it, to actually like hear that true sound was just super cool. One of my favorite space structures are the Pillars of Creation. It's a classic, obviously. And we got some brand new pictures from James Webb last year of the pillars. They look like these giant yellow monster's fingers that are reaching out through the heavens. Please correct me. I feel like I'm on the line with people who probably could describe it better. You're definitely on the track. The way I like to think of the Pillars of Creation, they are tall, skinny columns of gas and dust. And inside those those, those, those dusty columns are just beautiful little baby stars forming. What I like so much about this dataset, it's, you know, it's very iconic. So a lot of people have seen it are familiar with it. And it's just beautiful. But, you know, not everybody can access what that image looks like. So being able to take that data and combine it with Chander data where you're seeing

slightly older stars around it, that combination of data taking that and bringing it into something you can hear is really exciting. Well, let's hear some of it. Okay, this is actually, it's kind of creepy for a nursery. Yeah. What's interesting about this data set, you know, these tall columns of gas and dust, I think the tallest one's about four light years tall and a light year. The distance that light travels in a year, so about 10 trillion kilometers to say about 40 trillion kilometers tall.

And, you know, when you're looking at that, an optical light or infrared light, you're catching those beautiful structures and all around it are those slightly older stars that kind of like having these little temper tantrums, if you will, in x-ray light. And so as you're scanning across from left to right, you're capturing those beeps and boops of those little temper tantrum stars. And then you're also very clearly hearing those tall, thin structures. So that was sort of the idea with that one. So what are the beeps and boops exactly? When you look at the image created with x-ray light, showing all of those intense x-ray bright stars. It's like a spattering of paint. There's bright stars all over. And in this sonification,

their brightness and their position controls the note you're hearing. So every little beep and boop you hear is a star emitting intense x-rays. And the pitch of the note tells you where it is in the image. So if it's toward the top of the image, it's a higher pitch. And the volume tells you how bright or extended that object is. Okay. And so the windy kind of windy synthesizer sound is actually representing the pillar that I see in the picture. Correct. Yep. It's trying to capture that texture, if you will. That's so cool. I mean, can we learn anything scientifically by listening to the universe? Oh, absolutely. In astronomy, there's, I think, a couple of really good reasons for sonification for research. One of those

reasons would be studying time series data or things like variable stars. Variable stars, I think, are a great example because when you have a variable star, there's something changing, right? So you're getting the shape of the light curve, if you will, that's going to indicate different kinds of information, whether it's the relative sizes of the stars, relative surface brightnesses or whatnot. And being able to track that, all those changes by sound can be really helpful. That's so cool. Matt, are there some parts of the universe that are more rock and roll and other parts that are like more elevator music? There are. The clearest example is solar systems. And this is also one of the earliest

connections between music and astronomy. It's actually pretty straightforward to convert the motion of planets into musical rhythms and notes. And so when you do that, every solar system has its own beat and its own kind of harmony. So some are very pleasant and peaceful, and others are a little more tense and disjointed. So there's everything up there. What about our solar system? Where do we fall on the cheesy to cool spectrum? Well, that kind of depends on your aesthetics.

Our solar system is, it's not very harmonious in a classical sense, a fixed repeating beat like some other solar systems. But it has its own charm. I'm Flora Lickman. This is Science Friday. from WNYC Studios. I'm talking with scientists who turned space data into sound. You said the movements of planets can be converted to notes or rhythms.

I'm trying to imagine just what that means exactly. Like our orbit is given a note, our orbit around the sun? Yeah. So when you hear a note with your ears, what you're hearing is sound waves oscillating very, very fast. So it's air molecules bouncing back and forth at a certain frequency. And so if you take the motion of the planets, say in our solar system, and you imagine speeding everything up by many millions or billions of times, then each planet has its own frequency. It's doing its cycle at its own rate.

And so you can associate that with a certain frequency of sound. And you could see if the planets work together or against each other. Matt, what does it mean to you as an astrophysicist to hear outer space? Yeah, yeah, sometimes I do. It's always very exciting when you have a data set and you have some idea for how it's going to turn out, but you never really know until you design the algorithm, you write the code, and then you press run and you just sit back and listen to what's in that data. So that's always a very exciting moment. And as an astrophysicist, but also as a musician, I just also find it very exciting that there are several connections between music and astronomy. There are real sound waves happening in space. They can't travel to us because there's too much of a vacuum, but there is gas in space. There are stars. There are dust clouds with gas. And sound can travel through those objects. So I find it interesting from that perspective that it's kind of breaking that common idea that there's literally no sound in space when that's not quite true.

It just, sound just has a hard time traveling through space. There is sound in space. Yeah, wherever there's something to travel through. You heard it here first. I love that. I love that. Kim, what about what about you? I mean, just on the sort of emotional level, does listening to space produce a different feeling than looking over an Excel worksheet? Oh, absolutely. I mean, so I think the first time I've heard some of these pieces, again, I know the data really well. I've worked on this stuff for years, and so I know these pixels. And the very first time I heard the Galactic Center, it was one of the very first pieces that Matt and I worked on. And it was so moving to me because it's a very dense and busy data set.

There's a lot going on. There's all of these different kinds of light, three different kinds of light. It's sort of a downtown area of our Milky Way. It's like the hustle and bustle, the New York Times Square kind of area, right? So there's a lot happening, a lot of energy, a lot of activity. And I can stare at those pixels and I can understand it. But when I hear it, it just makes me think about different segments of the data in a different way. Sound itself just has a sort of stickiness to it, right?

Music kind of sticks in our head, and we process sound and music differently. And so I've looked at that image that I created back in 2009, I think, quite differently since hearing it. I've found things in the data that I never realized before. I've seen different, you know, sections of that image and process it in new ways. And I love that. I love that sound can make me think of a data set that I've, you know, known and loved for so long in a new way. I think it's really exciting. Yeah, it probably makes you have a different feeling about it, too, or adds to your feeling about it. Oh, absolutely. It adds to it. Absolutely. It does. Kim, part of the goal of this project was to create something that's more accessible for blind and low vision people. Have you heard any feedback from people who have used the sonifications? How have they impacted people? Yeah, so we've been working with people who are either blind or low vision on this project pretty much since day one.

We've had people saying things like, I didn't know the universe was so beautiful, or I didn't know the universe could be so engaging. I love that this project is able to bring the data that I get to swim in every day to more people. Well, thank you both for joining me today. Thanks for having us. Thanks so much. Dr. Kimberly Arcand is a visualization scientist at NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Dr. Matt Russo is an astrophysicist and musician at the University of Toronto.

To listen to Universal Harmonies, go to ScienceFriiday.com slash space sounds. I'm Flora Lichtenen. Thanks, Flora. Lots of folks helped us put the show together this week, including John Dan Koski, our director of news and audio, Annie Nero, our individual giving manager, and office manager, Valissa Mayors. BJ Leatherman composed our theme music.

If you missed any part of this program or would like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. You know, every day is Science Friday. I'm Charles Bergwist. Have a great weekend.