A wonderful birthday gift from Andy!

Generate sounds from Digitized Sky Survey data using sonification techniques

https://github.com/AstroAndyN/SonifyDSS

Examples

Outline
SonifyDSS is a python code that using sonification techniques to turn FITS data from the Digitized Sky Survey 2 collected from the NASA SkyView system (https://skyview.gsfc.nasa.gov) into sounds. It is focussed on generating sounds for composition or exploring data and so is highly configurable.

It is command-line based system and requires a modicum of experience of python.

The Sonification technique:
The sonfication technique maps from image brightness of a single pixel to volume of a particular frequency.

So, given a selection of image data from the DSS a line can be chosen across the image and all the pixels along that line allocated to different frequencies (with low frequency at one end, high frequency at the other). A sine wave at each frequency is generated with the amplitude determined by the brightness of the pixel and all the sine waves combined to produce a short sound.

The line can then be moved around the image data, producing a different pattern of pixels and hence a different sound. That is then appended to the previous sound and so on to create a sound of arbitrary length.

To generate stereo sounds, Red DSS2 survey data is used for the left channel and the Blue DSS2 data for the right.

What the code does
The software enables:

A particular piece of the sky to be downloaded from the DSS surveys.
A line to be “swept” across the data in a particular direction (top-to-bottom, circularly etc).
The sounds generated to be combined into a single audio file of chosen duration.
Optionally the code can also produce an image showing the DSS data and/or a movie showing the line “sweeping” over the image data (see the Examples)