Space Sounds| Hey! What Are You Looking At?
Awards & Nominations
Space Sounds has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!
Hey! What Are You Looking At?
Space Sounds
Summary
We have taken electromagnetic wave data from space and transformed it into sounds that are pleasant for the human ear.This is a very friendly way to browse and appreciate the data, and could be used by scientists or distributed to the public to find anomalies or interesting activity.
How We Addressed This Challenge
The intention is to create a technical framework and prototype that will meet the needs of listening to space data. In order to do this we looked at the data sets available and the technology that would be used to convert it to data. As well, we have designed a User Interface for the application prototype and included features that would be available within the developed product.
The final prototype was developed in Sketch using shapes and elements that can be quickly ported into an app for controlling audio playback and having synchronized animation. The initial sounds we have created were made using the first 2.5 minutes of the final Space Data MIDI files. The full Space Data MIDI files are over an hour and would render much longer audio using the Space Data MIDI files and a few selected SoundFonts preinstalled within the application.
How We Developed This Project
The space data is provided as list files which contain sequences of numbers in scientific exponential format. If these files are too big, they are first split into data sets of manageable size, then the numbers are converted to their unscaled representation. The unscaled representation is converted to array of bytes which are combined into a single byte array that represents the data in the entry file.
The bytes in the final array are then written to a MIDI track. Each byte is converted to an Int value between 0 and 127, which are mapped to a piano channel resulting in a sequence of piano keys. This MIDI file is then fed into a SoundFont or synthesizer and the final result is rendered.
We used Gradle to create a Kotlin project. We developed a few Kotlin classes to split files and convert the information in them. We then used the Java Sound API to create a MIDI sequence and then created a Track instance of MidiEvent instances.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
Most data used as input was curated by Bidroha Basu and was downloaded from:
https://www.ligo.caltech.edu
https://sne.space/sne/SN2011fe/
https://fermi.gsfc.nasa.gov/ssc/data/access/lat/ephems/
Project Demo
Space Sounds - Listening to Space Data
(Please do not count the Title and Thank You slides as part of the presentation.)
Project Code
Data & Resources
Space Data Repositories:
https://www.ligo.caltech.edu
https://sne.space/sne/SN2011fe/
https://fermi.gsfc.nasa.gov/ssc/data/access/lat/ephems/
https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/what-are-gw
https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/gravitational-waves/en/
Midi & SoundFont Development:
https://rollout.io/blog/building-a-midi-music-app-for-ios-in-swift/
https://github.com/markjamesm/linnstrument-helper
https://github.com/bradhowes/SoundFonts
UI Design & Animation:
https://iosexample.com/a-collection-of-swiftui-view-modifiers-for-creating-animated-color-gradients/
https://swiftui-lab.com/swiftui-animations-part3/ (Animated Gradients)
https://gist.github.com/swiftui-lab/e5901123101ffad6d39020cc7a810798