Blog
Three Reasons to Care about the Eclipse Soundscapes Project
Now that you’ve read all about the Soundscapes Project, you may be asking yourself: how does this apply to me? And that’s great! We love people who ask questions! The thing is, you don’t have to an astrophysicist, a diehard eclipse chaser, or a person with a visual disability to enjoy Eclipse Soundscapes. In fact, we think the more people our project reaches, the stronger it is. Here are three reasons you might want to pay attention to what we’re doing:
YOU CARE ABOUT INCLUSIVITY
One of the main objectives of the Eclipse Soundscapes Project is to bring this exciting astronomical event to the blind and visually impaired community. We want everyone to get as excited about astrophysics as we do, but the tools to make science accessible have not always existed. That’s why we’ve created an app with illustrative audio descriptions, which will be delivered in real time as the eclipse progresses, and an interactive “rumble map” which will allow users to explore the physical qualities of an eclipse through touch and sound. These tools are not only valuable to individuals who are blind and visually impaired, but to people of all different learning and communication styles. By providing these oft-excluded groups with the right tools to learn about astrophysics, we aim to strengthen science by reaching a larger, more diverse population.
YOU CARE ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT
There is no better time than now to get people interested in preserving our fascinating planet, and the more we know about our ecosystems, the better we can protect them. Eclipse Soundscapes is working with partners such as the National Park Service to collect high quality audio recordings in wildlife areas across the country. With these recordings, we hope to learn more about how and why animal behaviors change with the variations in light and temperature caused by a solar eclipse. After the eclipse, Eclipse Soundscapes will host these recordings alongside the recordings of citizen scientists to provide an open source database of sounds for researchers and educators to study.
YOU CARE ABOUT TECHNOLOGY
Are you an audio engineer? An app developer? A self-proclaimed video game nerd? When we set out to create our app, there were a lot of hurdles. But instead of setting the bar lower, our team innovated to create an app with some pretty exciting advancements in accessibility technology. We’re especially proud of our Rumble Map, which uses a technology called “FM Synthesis” to mimic a haptic response in a smartphone. The Rumble Map reads a grayscale value under the user’s finger, scales it from 0-1, and then adjusts the volume of a low frequency tone to produce vibrations in a phone’s speakers with a strength relative to the brightness of that section. The tool, created in collaboration between our audio engineer Miles Gordon and iOS developer Arlindo Goncalves, is based on the haptic response usually experienced in gaming and virtual reality platforms. Accessibility reviewers who tested the app say they’ve “never seen anything like it.” It’s a technology worthy of a patent, but that would go against our belief that science is for everybody. In fact, our entire project will be free and open source so other tech geeks can improve upon our innovations.
Of course, there are many other reasons to care about Eclipse Soundscapes. What’s yours? Tweet us at @EclipseSoundUDL to tell us why YOU are excited.
Eclipse Excitement Evident at Arrows to Aerospace Event
On Saturday, August 19, NASA scientists took a break from reaching into the depths of space and instead reached out to the citizens of suburban Nebraska to promote eclipse knowledge and safety at the Arrows to Aerospace Parade.
This year’s annual parade in Bellevue, Nebraska, just south of Omaha, was organized by the Bellevue-Offutt Kiwanis to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Nebraska’s statehood. However, when Bellevue Public Schools teacher Santha Walters learned the parade would coincide with the week of the August 21 “Great American Eclipse,” she enlisted NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center scientist Dr. Jack Ireland and Smithsonian Astrophysics Observatory scientist Dr. Henry “Trae” Winter to participate in the event.
“I realized the eclipse would be in the middle of the afternoon on a school day,” Ms. Walters said. “I thought, if we’re going to have all these kids, we’re going to use this as a learning opportunity.”
Ms. Walters pitched the idea to her superintendent as a weeklong string of activities to include the entire community. “Every child with resources is going to travel to totality on Monday,” she said. “Not everybody can take the day off work to experience the eclipse with their child. So I wanted to create something for those kids, to bring the eclipse to them and make them feel as if they are part of this community. This is something people are going to remember for the rest of their lives.”
Dr. Ireland and Dr. Winter spent the week in Bellevue, speaking to the general public on eclipse mechanics and safety and to seventh and eighth grade students about the importance of a STEAM education. “You could just see in their faces they thought ‘this is really cool, we have a real-life scientist here,’” Ms. Walters said.
Saturday’s parade was the final event of “Eclipse Event Bellevue 2017” before the grand finale of the eclipse, and thousands of Nebraskans and visitors poured out onto Lincoln Road to watch. While organizations of all stripes participated in the march, an underlying space and aeronautics theme had clearly established itself, from Star Wars costumes to eclipse t-shirts.
“We’re all so excited to have the eclipse right in our own backyard,” said Bellevue Mayor Rita Sanders, who plans to watch the eclipse from a leadership center in Aurora, Nebraska.
The parade culminated in Washington Park, where Dr. Ireland and Dr. Winter disembarked from their NASA-themed silver convertible to join their team at an eclipse information booth. The team came equipped with informational flyers, NASA stickers, demonstrations of the popular Eclipse Soundscapes app, and of course, free eclipse glasses.
The NASA approved eclipse glasses were a hot commodity. Popular vendors such as Amazon had run out of reputable viewing glasses in the weeks before the eclipse, and many booth visitors reported being unable to find them for a reasonable price. Luckily, the group from NASA and the Smithsonian had come prepared with over 5,000 pair, which they gave away to an eager line of parade-goers stretching back nearly a block.
Though the booth’s guests were excited to score free glasses, many were equally thrilled to meet two real-life astrophysicists. “I was amazed at how many people were at the parade and how many waited in line to talk to Jack and me about the eclipse,” Dr. Winter said. “We got really well thought out and specific questions and I loved talking to everyone who came by our booth.”
“It’s cool because they are obviously really smart and know a lot,” said one Bellevue High School student, who walked alongside the Dr. Ireland and Dr. Winter in the parade. “But they are also regular people, and easy to talk to.”
Another enthusiastic visitor was a nine year old girl from Bellevue, who hopes to become an astronaut on Mars one day. She is excited to experience her first total solar eclipse.
“I’ve only only seen one before, and it was amazing,” Dr. Ireland told her. “It’s the most spectacular thing I’ve seen in the skies by far.”
Armed with her eclipse glasses and a beaming smile, she titled her head towards the sky and prepared to be amazed.
Will Wildlife Sound Off during Eclipse 2017?
Birds suddenly stop singing, insects return to their nests, and creatures of the night sound off in the middle of the day. It’s easy to see why solar eclipses once elicited premonitions of doom. But scientists believe there is more than superstition to these changes in animal behavior, and with the August 21, 2017 eclipse, researchers hope to study exactly how and why they occur. That’s why Eclipse Soundscapes has partnered with the National Park Service, Brigham Young University, Idaho, and citizen scientists across the country to record audio data as the eclipse progresses.
Using high-quality recording equipment, including binaural microphone arrays which simulate human hearing, Eclipse Soundscapes will capture audio in a variety of biologically diverse environments, including 15 national parks in the path of totality and two more that will experience a partial eclipse. Audio samples will be taken the day before, the day after, and the day of the eclipse in order to understand how soundscapes fluctuate as the moon blocks out the sun’s light and heat.
“It is clear that animals do respond to the eclipse,” Dr. Kurt Fristrup of the National Park Service said in a press release. “The question is going to be: how much of that response is detectable acoustically? We could see dramatic changes. Past research has studied individual sites during an eclipse, and minor papers have been published, but no one has looked at this phenomenon on a continental scale.”
It is difficult to know exactly what to expect, since most reports of animal sound during an eclipse are purely anecdotal. The last scientific study on the topic was completed by the Eclipse Behavior Committee of the Boston Society for Natural History 85 years ago, surrounding the August 1932 eclipse in Maine, New Hampshire, and Northeastern Massachusetts. In the study, the committee asked citizen scientists to report observations on animal behavior in their location.
The response was overwhelming. Observers reported that birds stopped singing, ants busily carrying cargo stopped and remained motionless, bees returned to their hives, and fish surfaced, while crickets and frogs erupted in a chorus. When the sun re-emerged, birds began a dawn chorus.
In general, it appeared that with the darkening of the sun, diurnal animals settled into their dusk routines, while nocturnal animals stirred to action.
Of course, it is impossible to make generalizations about an entire species based on the actions of individuals in an isolated area, but some of the species — such as the crickets and frogs, responded to the eclipse in unison, producing a much more measurable response. It is possible that these creatures respond more to an eclipse because their behaviors are dictated by light, as opposed to the circadian rhythms which produce sleep/wake cycles in creatures like humans.
That’s not to say “higher” mammals are unaffected by an eclipse. A report of a 1984 solar eclipse by the American Journal of Primatology reported that chimps at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center congregated on their climbing structure and oriented themselves in the direction of the eclipse. One juvenile chimp reportedly stood upright and gestured in the direction of the eclipse.
Humans respond to eclipses with comparable excitement (just do a quick social media search for #Eclipse2017 to see how much buzz the August 21 eclipse has generated). For this reason, Eclipse Soundscapes is not limiting audio recording to wildlife areas. Urban areas, where human reactions to the eclipse can be studied, are of particular interest to sociologists and anthropologists. In that regard, the eclipse is a perfect chance for humans to study ourselves, and where we fit into our ecosystem and the greater universe.
All recordings from partners and citizens scientists will be collected and hosted in a database on EclipseSoundscapes.org. This database will be free and open source so that researchers, educators, artists, anyone else who is interested can access and listen to these soundscapes.
Hear the 2017 Eclipse
The concepts of light and shadow are crucial to how most of us understand a solar eclipse. But what if you had never seen the light of the sun before? What if an accident or a genetic condition impeded your ability to perceive the shadows of nightfall? For 1.3 million Americans who are blind, and many more who are visually impaired, experiencing the wonder of a total solar eclipse may seem like a pipedream. The Eclipse Soundscapes Project wants to change that.
The Eclipse Soundscapes Project, sponsored by NASA’s Heliophysics Education Consortium, will allow both sighted and non-sighted users to experience the “Great American Eclipse” of August 21, 2017 through sound — by recording changes in natural and urban soundscapes during the eclipse, and through illustrative audio descriptions (provided by WGBH’s National Center for Accessible Media, or NCAM) so that people who are blind and visually impaired can enjoy a narration of the eclipse in real time. The Eclipse Soundscapes app also includes an interactive “rumble map,” so users can explore the physical properties of an eclipse through vibrational feedback in their smartphones.
“The archetypal image of an astronomer is somebody with their eye to a telescope looking out to the stars — that automatically leaves out the segment of the population who are blind and visually impaired,” said Dr. Henry “Trae” Winter, the project’s founder and principal investigator. “But science works for everyone, no matter who you are. Giving people who have been traditionally excluded from the astronomy and astrophysics enterprise a tool to explore science on their own terms is giving them an experience which means a lot to me.”
Audio is an ideal way for blind and visually impaired users to experience an eclipse, not only because there is some anecdotal evidence of soundscapes changing during a total eclipse, but because blind and visually impaired individuals naturally develop instincts to navigate the world with auditory information.
“The audio takes a visual concept and brings it into one of the ways that we experience the world without sight,” said Dr. Wanda Diaz Merced, a blind astrophysicist consulting on the project. “Audio is the fastest and most straightforward way to provide an experience that we hope will awe people.”
Exploring the eclipse with the Eclipse Soundscape app may even give visually impaired individuals a leg up on their sighted peers when it comes to eclipse knowledge. NCAM developed the audio descriptions of the eclipse with methods usually designated for educational materials such as textbooks. The details of the description are “dictated by the context of the image, not necessarily its complexity or visual interest,” said Bryan Gould, director of Accessible Learning and Assessment Technologies at NCAM. “Since the Eclipse Soundscapes project has specific educational goals for each phase of the eclipse, this image description includes scientific and technical terms and their definitions.”
With this additional information, those listening may contribute something new to a discussion of the eclipse with their sighted peers. The “rumble map” also allows for a detailed up-close exploration of the sun and moon, where a user may find elements that a person viewing the eclipse wouldn’t notice.
The goal is to have a multitude of tools, so visually impaired individuals can interact with the eclipse independently and on their own terms. “Disabled people are as different from one another as abled people are,” Dr. Diaz-Merced said. “Actually, we are more different from one another. I need to be able to bring my own strategies to anything I do. Not coping strategies, but my own strategies.”
While Eclipse Soundscapes is primarily focused on the blind and visually impaired community, the audio and tactile tools used in the project could benefit anyone who learns or communicates through non-visual measures. After the August 21 eclipse, the Eclipse Soundscapes team plans to expand the prototype into an interactive and immersive multi-sensory museum exhibit. The multi-sensory information adds to the experience for visual people, Dr. Winter said, “but allows for different ways to engage people who are visually impaired, or deaf, or neuroatypical.” However you collect information about the world around you, the hope is that you thoroughly enjoy the experience of learning something new.
Our Origin Story
The Egyptian death mask was inconceivably ornate, so intricate that one could study it for hours and still find new details. But because the mask was under glass, a blind person could not touch it, could not run her fingers across the beads and engravings and smooth crevasses of the face. She could only raise her fingers to the braille plaque and read: Egyptian death mask.
That troubled astrophysicist Dr. Henry “Trae” Winter. But what troubled him more was the realization that his own recently installed exhibit — a visually striking solar wall — was even less accessible. He began brainstorming how he could share his love of science with the blind and visually impaired community, and joined the “Tactile Sun” project, which creates tangible images of the sun using 3D printers.
Some months later, he visited his congenitally blind friend Chancey Fleet at work at the New York Public Library’s Andrew Heiskell Talking Book and Braille Library, and gifted her a braille book about the August 21, 2017 “Great American Eclipse.” Winter was surprised when Fleet finished the book and admitted she still didn’t entirely understand an eclipse. As someone who had never seen light, or shadows, or even a map of the United States, she was missing the visual concepts most of us unthinkingly use to understand such events.
So Winter shifted gears, and told an anecdote of the “false dawn chorus,” an eclipse phenomenon in which light-sensitive creatures such as crickets become confused when the moon blocks out the sun. When sunlight re-emerges, the creatures believe it to be dawn, and initiate their morning chirping. Fleet not only understood, but got excited, and Winter realized that soundscapes were the key to unlocking the eclipse for the blind and visually impaired community.
Winter got started immediately on the Eclipse Soundscapes Project. “Not only would it be a way to engage the visually impaired community in a way that’s accessible, a way they can relate to along with their sighted peers, but there might also be some science as well,” Winter said.
The Eclipse Soundscapes app, which will be released at the beginning of August, will include illustrated audio descriptions of the eclipse in real time, recordings of the changing environmental sounds during the eclipse, and an interactive “rumble map” app that will allow users to visualize the eclipse through touch. You can read more about it on our About the Project Page.
So why is Winter, a sighted person, so determined to bring astrophysics to the visually impaired community? “Science only works if it’s for everybody,” he said. “I really hope we build tools that inspire and make possible the tools of the future. There’s a saying: ‘I can only see further because I’m on the shoulders of giants.’ Scientists know that their work is made possible by those who came before, and will be advanced by those who come after. We’re all part of chain. But I hope to be a useful link in building the future.”