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 physicsl systems,
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
Back to NACSE's Home