Ear to the Sky: astronomical sonification for accessible outreach, education and research with strauss

The visual bias pervading STEM fields is particularly keen in astronomy, with an emphasis on observation and imaging of astronomical phenomena, and a public perception built on “pretty pictures”. However, visual focus is exclusionary for a range of people who have non-visual preferences for learning and communication. Efforts are growing to explore a multimodal approach and express data in new ways. Sonification in particular provides many promising possibilities of building real insights and intuition into complex astronomical data sets, harnessing the high dynamic range of human hearing (in terms of both volume and pitch). Challenging the entrenched visual biases in the presentation of astronomy requires widespread and robust testing of alternative modalities, alongside adequate and general tools to sonify data. The Ear to the Sky project aims to tackle these two aspects through investigating a number of promising applications of sonification in astronomy, while
using and developing the strauss Python code as a generalised tool for sonifying data for analysis, outreach and education.