Sonification of Growing Black Hole

We present a sonification of time series data of X-rays and visible light from the black hole system MAXI J1820+070, during a rapid accretion episode in 2018. We used the open source Python package STRAUSS to produce the sonification (Trayford and Harrison 2023). This sonification is designed to represent a complex physical process to the general public in a way that is intuitive and accessible. Sound is used to simultaneously represent the different wavelengths by using different timbres and pitches of synthesised sounds, and by using stereo panning. The visible data can be heard to the listener’s left, with each of five different observed bands assigned a separate pitch. The X-ray data is heard to the right and is represented by a ‘windy’ white noise sound. Both the pitched and the noisy sounds increase in intensity (controlled by varying a filter cutoff frequency) with increasing visible and X-ray brightness, respectively. This sonification is designed as a public engagement piece, with a secondary goal of making an accessible representation of the data for users with who need, or prefer, non-visual methods of communication. The sonification is combined with an animation, which is an artistic impression of the same data. This animation was created by John Paice and collaborators, using data obtained and analysed for a scientific publication (Paice et al. 2019). In the attached article, we describe the methods used to create this sonification, as well as the design rationale. We release the code used to make the sonification alongside the article.

Here we release:
1. An article (or README), explaining how the audio-visual was produced: Growing_Black_Hole_Sonification.pdf

2. The audio file of the resulting sonification: black_hole_sonification.wav

3. The audio-visual file: black_hole_animation.mp4

4. A zip file containing the script (in the form of a Python Jupyter notebook) that was used to produce the sonification. In this zip file, there is:
4a. The code to make the sonification: Black_Hole_Sonification/STRAUSS_black_hole_animation.ipynb
4b. The six base sound samples that were manipulated (within the code) to create the sonification: Black_Hole_Sonification/base_sounds/xray_base_sound.wav

Black_Hole_Sonification/base_sounds/u_base_sound.wav Black_Hole_Sonification/base_sounds/g_base_sound.wav Black_Hole_Sonification/base_sounds/r_base_sound.wav Black_Hole_Sonification/base_sounds/i_base_sound.wav Black_Hole_Sonification/base_sounds/z_base_sound.wav