Now hear this

DURING the first world war Heinrich Barkhausen, a German physicist, carried into the trenches an antenna, a crude electronic amplifier and a pair of headphones. His mission: to intercept Allied field-telephone communications. The strange noises he heard among the transmissions were not, as he thought, a problem with his equipment; later it was discovered that these “whistlers” were radiofrequency bursts from extremely distant lightning. Barkhausen was among the first scientists to learn something new about the world from sound alone.

By the 1960s, seismologists were using instruments that recorded local tremblings as frequency modulations on magnetic tape. Days and weeks of data lay on these tapes, and the only way to sift through them for interesting events was to play them back at high speed, listening for any anomalies. The field of sonification—turning data into sound—had been born. When the Voyager 2 space probe passed Saturn in 1981 and sent back a stream of data that its keepers could not decipher, they sonified it. The hailstorm-like sound, they determined, came from debris in Saturn’s rings striking the craft.