Sounds Like Science - Lowell Observatory
Sound is a powerful thing. It’s how most of us communicate face-to-face, making sounds that translate into language. Music, depending on its tempo, pitch, and scale, can make us feel certain emotions. In. . .
Sound is a powerful thing. It’s how most of us communicate face-to-face, making sounds that translate into language. Music, depending on its tempo, pitch, and scale, can make us feel certain emotions. In movies and television shows, sounds that aren’t loud enough to be picked up by on-set microphones (like the rustle of sheets or the creaking of floorboards) are painstakingly recreated in post-production. National Science Foundation (NSF) Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Clara Brasseur is working to use sound in a way you might not have considered: to view telescope data without using your eyes. As noted by Dr. Kate Minker in a previous blog, there are two types of astronomers: those who were drawn to the field by a love of science fiction, and those who were drawn by a love of natural science. In Brasseur’s case, it’s the former. “I was a science fiction reader from a young age,” she says. “One of the first nonfiction books I read cover to cover wasA Brief History of Timeby Stephen Hawking. I was 12 and desperate. ”That spark of interest would lead Brasseur to begin college as a math major, veering into astronomy after reading a nonfiction astronomy book about high Z supernovas, which are exploding stars observed from a long distance. “Which is funny,” notes Brasseur, “because I actually have no interest in studying high Z supernovas now. ” She switched her major from math to physics as her interests continued to shift, eventually earning a BA in Astrophysics and Music Composition from Oberlin College in 2008, followed by an MA in Music Composition from Mills College in 2010. Brasseur had initially planned to pursue a career in music composition after graduating. “I realized that in order to have a career as a composer, you need to do a lot of things that also aren’t composition,” she says, “and I hated every single one of those things. ” So, she turned away from music and back to numbers. “I was so resistant to combining the two in my own life,” she says. “I thought, ‘I do math, and I do music, and never the twain shall meet. ’ But at the same time, I went to a liberal arts school. I have never been someone who believes that the humanities and the sciences are actually separate, the way people think they are. ”She began work as a software developer at the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) in Baltimore, Maryland. There, her interest in sonification was piqued by a project being kickstarted by Dr. Scott Fleming, who was deputy branch manager at the time: a program for sonifying astronomical data. In astronomy, ‘sonification’ refers to the process of translating digital space data, such as light curves, radio waves, or pixel brightness in images into audible sound. Sonifications allow the audience, including those with visual impairments, to “listen” to images and interpret their data. As the holder of two music degrees, Brasseur felt particularly up to the challenge of creating the program, which would become known as Astronify. Today, she is its lead developer and maintainer. Astronify processes “time-series data,” like how a star’s brightness changes over days or weeks, by scaling observation duration into listening time and mapping the data values to pitch. Just like raw data from a telescope can be processed into an image, sonification maps properties like brightness, position, and frequency to parameters like volume and pitch. “I have some very strong feelings about ways to do and not do sonification that are definitely informed by my musical background,” says Brasseur. “There can be a big focus on making things sound nice rather than making sure the data is being represented. What people tend to do is use a major scale and go, ‘great, we’ve made it sound like a piano. ’ I’m like, ‘okay, but you’ve added a lot of information, and you’ve changed things by doing that. ’”Some researchers, Brasseur notes, are limited by their adherence to Western musical norms when creating sonifications. “What if you could use the microtones that are found in a lot of Indian music?” she asks. “That would also sound good. But they aren’t coming from that musical tradition, so they don’t think to go there. ”She recalls a course she took while pursuing her music degree as an example of a moment that shifted her view of the “rules” of music: “The professor spent the whole class peeling back layers and layers of the metaphors we use when describing music and asking, ‘why?’ Why do we say that a high note is higher than a lower note? Because it has a higher frequency. Well, what makes the frequency higher? It has more waves per second. Okay, but why does ‘more’ mean ‘higher’? Everyone wanted to murder each other by the end, but I’ve never forgotten that lesson. ”Being forced to question exactly what it is that shapes our perception of sound and rethinking the cultural assumptions around them might be just the sort of existential crisis a researcher needs to have before effectively turning data into sound. Brasseur hopes that one day there will be a well-understood framework for creating sonifications, comparable to what already exists for astronomy visualizations. “This is where a lot of work is currently being done with sonification,” she explains. “If you think about the parallels with visualization, and the years and years of both research and figuring out what works by doing, we have the best ways to present information visually. We are really at the beginning of that process for sonifications. ”During her time at MAST, Brasseur also developed Astrocut, a package of cutout tools for astronomical data. Cutout tools extract small, localized images or data subsets from massive, multi-gigabyte sky survey files, allowing researchers to isolate a specific target instead of downloading massive full-frame telescope images. While Astrocut was in development, she completed an Astrophysics MSc from Liverpool John Moores University in 2019 andAfter receiving her PhD from the University of St Andrews in 2025, Brasseur pivoted from astronomical software development to more traditional, academic research positions. As an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Lowell, she studies the magnetic fields of low-mass stars and substellar objects, specifically radio signatures of stellar coronae, and multi-wavelength studies of stellar flares. She builds data-driven 3D models of magnetic fields above the surfaces of stars and uses them to generate simulated observations for comparison with real data. She is also a member of the Fulcrum collaboration, a multi-wavelength observing program investigating the spectral characteristics of stellar flares. She is deeply involved with the Astropy Project, a community effort to develop a core package for astronomy using the Python programming language and improve usability and collaboration between astronomy Python packages. Outside of work, Brasseur plays the cello in the Flagstaff Community Orchestra and enjoys making adorable stuffed versions of research telescopes (like the stuffed Hubble Space Telescope pictured below), a hobby she picked up as a way to make gifts for her colleagues.