Visualizing Physics with Sound
As part of placing our Computational Physics Course on the
WWW, we investigate how to use sound to present
or ``visualize'' a variety of physical phenomena.
So far we have used the following methods to create soundfiles of physical
systems:
Sounds Like Geiger Counter?
- Sounds from Spontaneous Decay Simulation
- Direct Transformation
- This is the trivial case of oscillating systems. Most forms of sound are
produced by some kind of oscillation and so all we have to do is
convert our data into a format which can be used by a soundplayer on a
computer.
- Frequency Modulation
- In this case we change the frequency of the sound according to some value
of our physical system.
- Recording Events
- Sometimes all you want to do is have a tic whenever an atom decays,
a function passes an axis or a particle is scattered. Although this problem
turns out to be similar to the direct transformation it still deserves
its own section.
- Inverse Fourier Transformation
- Here the experiment produces a set of data which we use as a Fourier
spectrum to create a soundfile.
Sound conversions done with SoX - Sound eXchange
Written by
The Landau NACSE Research Group
Back to NACSE in Physics