Hearing the cosmos

Space isn't silent. What happens when we listen to the Universe as well as look? Paul Fisher Cockburn explores how sonification - turning data into sound unlocks new ways for us to understand the cosmos.

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Movie posters for the classic 1979 horror film Alien warned us: "In space no one can hear you scream." And while it's true that sound can't travel through a vacuum, it doesn't follow that the Universe is quiet - or that we can't learn a lot by keeping our ears open. In fact, listening in to the mysteries of the cosmos gives us new insights that our eyes can't reveal. That's why in October 2025, scientists from around the world, and across several different disciplines, met at a workshop hosted by New York's research-focused Flatiron Institute. Titled 'Sonification for Research: Techniques, Efficacy, and Applications (SoniTEA)', its aim was to push forward the practice of sonification - using sound to represent data, especially as a research tool.

One of the workshop's organisers was Michael Petersen, currently a Stephen Hawking Fellow based at the University of Edinburgh. "We're just so used to interpreting things with our eyes - graphs, figures and images - that we've kind of developed a habit of not doing it with our ears," he says. As he points out, though, listening for information is something we have been doing, in certain situations, for more than A century. One early example of sonification technology is the Geiger-Müller counter. Who isn't familiar with the eerie clicks used to represent the dangerous ionising radiation it's detecting?

Petersen is understandably enthusiastic about the potential of sonification, but accepts not everyone has the same goal. “For the most part, people aren't looking to replace visuals with sound,” he explains. “You do want sonification to be a complete data representation without sight, because that ticks the accessibility boxes - that's very important. But I think you should be approaching it in an augmented way, not as a pure replacement.”