Robert, where will you be five years from now?

I don't think I would've been able to come up with an answer

as cool as what I actually feel like I'm doing, you know?

[ETHEREAL MUSIC]

ROBERT ALEXANDER: My name is Robert Alexander.

And I'm a data sonification specialist with the Solar and

Heliospheric Research Group.

To sonify something just means that you're taking any type of

data and just turning it into sound.

So it could be a measurement of the stock market.

It could be a measurement of people entering

and exiting a room.

It could be your heartbeat.

So if you think about a heart rate monitor--

beep, beep--

essentially, this is a sonification

of someone's pulse.

I think of myself as an explorer.

I live in the space between art, and science, and

technology.

And the Toroidal Universe project is a great example.

I collaborated with this amazing visual artist by the

name of Danielle Battaglia.

And we created this multi-sensory experience in

which people, they can just get lost in these theoretical

higher dimensional spaces.

And these were filled with these sounds that I generated

from raw satellite data that were these kind of guide posts

as you move around.

It really is important for me to remain grounded in what it

means to just be connected with the world of sound in a

very tangible, very visceral way.

So then when I go off and I'm interacting with the sun, it

gives me a sense of grounding in a sense.

And it kind of helps just round out my life and to

maintain a healthy sort of balance, I

guess you could say.

So as I was finishing up my master's degree, I was

approached by Thomas Zurbuchen who leads the Solar and

Heliospheric Research Group.

And he was interested in taking some other data and

turning it into sound.

So I met with their team.

And they put up a bunch of plots.

And they were telling me about coronal holes, and they were

throwing out this scientific jargon.

And I really didn't understand much of it.

But then they put up these images and these movies.

And then I really started to understand why

they were so excited.

It's because what's happening out there is absolutely

amazing, and it was all silent.

So essentially they're interested in kind of creating

a soundtrack for these things that are taking

place out in space.

SUSAN LEPRI: He brought to us this idea of sonifying data,

which is really quite innovative and maybe even

transformative.

ROBERT ALEXANDER: I had no idea what data

audification was.

But that's what I was doing at the time is I was taking this

solar data, and I was writing it directly into audio files.

So I hit play.

And I hear this underlying hum.

And there seemed to be a structure.

The hum would rise and fall.

So then after I crunched all the numbers, I realized that

what I was listening to was something that was

periodically happening every roughly 27 days.

And that's exactly the rotational period of the sun.

And then, from there it was this journey of realizing that

I'm listening to the solar cycle, so the rise and the

fall in solar activity.

And then, at that point, I realized this can really

actually teach us something new.

At first, it came off as extremely cerebral.

And it was just a tone that kind of went up and down.

And there really wasn't very much emotion behind it.

And we really didn't know how we wanted to start to

investigate these sounds.

So then as it evolved, they said, well, how about we try

an emotional journey?

So a week later, I came back, and I had created this

iteration whereby you take a journey from the Earth out to

the sun and back, with sonification audio underlying

this whole entire experience.

Every single piece of that music is driven in some way,

shape, or form by that data.

And all of the choices in terms of the rise and the

fall, all of them relate back to the underlying data.

And all of them are true to the data in some

way, shape, or form.

Starting with one of the more predominant things that you're

actually hearing is that drumbeat.

There's a question of are there African tribal drummers

on the surface of the sun?

And the answer is no.

But if you think about a scientific graph, there are

hash marks.

And you need these hash marks to make sense.

What the drum beat is is it's a sort of grandiose metronome,

in a sense.

And it just lets you know where you are

within this data set.

So for that piece with the drumming that's all over the

year 2003, and the drumming actually lets you, like every

eight bars, that you've gone through one full

rotation of the sun.

And in a sense, if you hear something that happens at the

beginning of the bar and then you hear something happen

again, similarly, at the beginning eight bars later,

then you know that this might be a feature that's persisted

across an entire solar rotation now, and it's coming

back in the musical form.

And the sun then provides the structure and can provide

these sort of recurring themes.

And the drums just give it that structure

within which to evolve.

I recorded the voice of my sister, Amanda Alexander.

And she has a great alto voice.

And originally I was thinking about these charge states of

carbon, and the fact that as one of them goes up, another

one comes down.

And so when you have a lower voice versus a higher voice,

there's actually more energy pushing out

those higher notes.

So when I'm representing a higher energetic state, I'm

using a more energized voice.

And in this way, it's kind of appealing directly to the

intuition of the listener in that when you hear these

voices get more energized, you're at a higher energy

level coming from the sun, essentially.

I create a structure.

I create a framework.

And without the data driving that framework,

nothing takes place.

So the structure just kind of exists on its own.

And then it's the data that creates all the motion, that

creates all the interaction, and all the

progression of the music.

SUSAN LEPRI: Initially, it started out sort of more

looking at the aesthetics of how can you sonify solar wind?

And it was a musical sort of approach.

But then it evolved more into a scientific

data analysis method.

When he was working with the scientists here, Enrico Landi,

who is, I believe, the first author on the paper, he found

that he could actually hear some of the trends more

clearly in some of the elements.

ROBERT ALEXANDER: I was digging through like 20, 30

different data parameters and listening to them all.

And I realized that if I listened to carbon that I

could hear a very strong, harmonic presence.

And I started to think, if I'm hearing carbon here, but no

one in the group has ever really been

talking about carbon.

It's not really something that they

stress as being important.

And yet, here, fundamentally, this is one of the strongest

periodic signals that I had found up to that point.

I'm thinking maybe this is something worth looking into a

little bit more.

We were able to figure out that, if we use carbon, that

we can trace the origins of the solar wind

with a higher accuracy.

So we can figure out where it's originating on the sun.

SUSAN LEPRI: This was fairly significant research findings

that came out of this audification thing.

So it really, I think, set the stage for Robert to do a lot

more exciting things with the sonification of data.

ROBERT ALEXANDER: We wrote everything up.

And we said that the ear can be an extremely powerful tool

in the analysis of this type of data, of time series data.

And some people at NASA, I guess, got excited about that.

And they said, all right, let's give it a shot.

And so now I'm in the second year of my NASA JPFP

fellowship.

And I spent the last summer working at NASA Goddard.

And I was really amazed at how eager they all were to pick up

the ball with sonification.

And so it was really invigorating to be in that

kind of space with those kinds of minds and to be tackling

these kinds of ideas.

We forget that the most powerful tool that we have for

exploring the universe is right between our two ears.

And those same two ears provide a wealth of

information beyond what our eyes can actually see.

When we open up our ears and open up our minds, we open

ourselves up to an entirely new way of

understanding the universe.