August 10, 2012, 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

August 10, 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

Listening to IBEX, Hubble, STEREO and SDO Imagery: Hearing More than We Can See Through The Musical Encoding of Data and Increasing Accessibility in the Process.

Marty Quinn, University of New Hampshire

Marty Quinn is a pioneer in movement and image perception through the application of massive numbers of synthesizer voices. Awarded a Heliophysics STEREO grant in 2008 to tour "Walk on the Sun" to science and blind centers across the country, the exhibit enables people to literally walk or move over images of the Sun data projected onto the ground, and hear the pixels they are selecting through body motion as musical pitches played by various instruments. In this seminar, Quinn will present recent work translating IBEX skymap and data files into musical sounding audio, discuss sonic design issues related to imagery and movement, and share recent experiences with the blind listeners. In addition, Quinn would like to introduce collaborator and University of Michigan PhD student Robert Alexander who will briefly discuss his summer sonic scientific analysis work at Goddard. Quinn founded Design Rhythmics Sonification Research Lab in 1992 and is now a scientific programmer with the IBEX science and operations team at the University of New Hampshire. He is also involved with the Prediccs Radiation in Space monitoring project.