Hey, it's Lindsey and Marshall we are in the middle right now of preparing for our most exciting live show ever It's called Sonic Saturday and it's happening in Brooklyn, New York on May 10th Sonic Saturday is going to be crazy crazy It's a free event to celebrate science with storytelling games and interactive fun for families And we're doing not one but two shows one in the morning and one in the afternoon We'll also have live demonstrations of accessible technology and hands -on science activities from local STEM educators Tiny Scientist and Independent Science, an organization that promotes
STEM equity and inclusion for the blind and low -vision communities.
And we have special guest Dan Sacks, our friend from the awesome music podcast Noodle Loaf.
RSVP for the event in the link in the episode description, and if you can't make it, don't You can still watch the show it will be recorded and available to stream after the performance and we'll put that link in the description Once it's available now.
We want to share with you one of the episodes that inspired this live performance It's called the science of ocean sounds Hi, I'm Lindsay and I'm Marshall welcome to tumble the show where we explore stories of science discovery today Today we're exploring the sounds of ocean science.
What kind of sounds?
Like waves, bubbles, fish singing?
No, sounds like this.
Whoa, what is that?
We're about to go on a sound science scavenger hunt to find out.
Okay, so, what was going on with that weird sound that interrupted our beautiful theme?
It sounded like I was in the wheel of a bulldozer.
You mean the sound?
What is it? I don't think I'm gonna tell you just yet.
Is this one of those mysteries where I have to figure it out on my own?
It is. It's a sound scavenger hunt episode.
All right. Scavenger hunts.
Is this where we go from house to house looking for clues?
You can stay in the same place, but we're going to use our ears.
So here's the setup.
We're about to meet a scientist who uses sound to study the ocean.
And I'm going to play a few of the sounds right now that we're going to be searching for throughout the episode.
So listen carefully because here's the first sound All right, that is a sound here's the second Okay, and here's the last All right, so I've already asked about this one what is it All will be explained soon, but I'll give you one tiny little clue.
One of the sounds is used to collect data about the ocean, and the other two are used to help understand the ocean.
Okay. That's not much of a clue.
That's all I'm giving you to go on.
So are you ready to start?
Sure. Okay. Great. Let's meet the scientist behind the sounds.
Her name is Amy Bower.
I'm a scientist who is trying to understand how the oceans work.
Specifically, I'm trying to map out all the ocean currents right down to the bottom of the ocean from top to bottom.
Wow! She's like an ocean map maker.
Amy is an oceanographer.
That just makes so much sense.
She's been curious about how the ocean works since she was little.
I grew up on the ocean, so you know I was naturally very interested about what the ocean was doing all the time, too.
Why are those waves bigger today?
Why... why... what makes the tides work?
So basically she was observing the ocean like a kid ocean scientist?
Yeah, but years later when Amy was actually in school to become a scientist, she discovered something about the ocean that would fascinate her for decades.
That's when I first started to learn that there were these giant rivers in the ocean, otherwise known as ocean currents, that carry huge volumes of water, of seawater, all around the globe.
I had no idea that was true before then.
And I just thought that was awe -inspiring.
Wait. There's giant rivers in the ocean?
How can there be rivers in water?
Ocean currents are patterns of fast -moving seawater powered in part by the wind.
So the water next to the current is not moving that much and then you have a strip sort of ocean that is moving pretty quickly.
So how big are these currents are we talking like Big River or narrow stream?
Some of the biggest currents in the ocean are equivalent to a thousand Mississippi Rivers.
Well, so I would have thought like one Mississippi is pretty big, but this is like two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four Mississippi, five Mississippi.
By the time you get to 1 ,000 Mississippi Rivers, you've got a lot of Mississippi.
That's a lot of Mississippi.
That's a mind -bogglingly large amount of water.
What's even more mind -boggling is how little we know about these currents.
Part of what I'm trying to understand is where are all the currents.
You where are they anyway?
And how strong are they?
What path do they follow?
There are many questions like that that we don't have answers to yet in the deep ocean.
So we don't even understand yet how our ocean functions in many respects.
That's why Amy is making a map of ocean currents.
It will help us understand how the ocean works and how its flow affects our climate.
So how does Amy make that ocean current map.
Using sound. Is this going to be a clue to our scavenger hunt?
Maybe. Just keep your ears tuned!
If the currents you wish to see answer me these questions three.
So first, Amy heads out into the ocean.
Oceanographers like me, many of us go out on these ocean expeditions.
Ooo, adventure on the high seas.
A big research ship takes Amy and her colleagues to wherever she wants to map the currents and once they're there they take out a special buoy, a container designed to float underwater and capture data about the water's temperature, speed, direction and more.
We just drop those over the side, they sink down to the depth of the current that we want to investigate And then we just go away and they drift. Wait, so they just drift out on their own?
Yes. These buoys act like intrepid explorers, following the currents and keeping a log of their travels.
And scientists track these buoys using sound.
At the same time we put the buoys out, we anchor the sound beacons in the general area where we think the buoys are going to drift. Those sound beacons emit a sound.
Hahaha, there it is.
One of the mystery sounds!
DING. Ten points. Me.
First stop on our scavenger hunt!
That is a signal that communicates with drifting buoys in the ocean.
So several times a day they send out this signal And the drifting buoy has a hydrophone which is like a microphone for underwater.
Does it do like an underwater podcast?
Does it have guests?
Is it short form or a narrative?
The hydrophone is really more of a listening microphone and the buoy sound is kind of like the speaker.
And the hydrophone on the drifting buoy is listening for just this particular signal.
The instruments inside the buoy records the time it hears the signal.
So we know how long it took the sound to go from the sound beacon to the drifting buoy.
We also know the speed of sound in water.
Using some simple multiplication, Amy can figure out the distance between the sound beacon and the drifting buoy.
So the sound beacon is tracking the drifting buoy.
Yeah, and there's a bunch of these sound beacons anchored to the ocean floor, so it's Sort of like an ongoing game of Marco Polo as the buoy moves through the current.
So, we have to have two parts to this system.
There's the drifting buoy itself plus the sound beacons.
Using sound, Amy can pinpoint the position of the buoy and map its movements across the ocean.
So that's how she makes the ocean current map.
So what has she found so far?
Well, she's found that ocean currents do some unusual things.
For example, Amy told me about the time she used these buoys to study a mysterious current off the coast of Spain and Portugal.
After about a year, each one of those buoys popped up to the surface and gave us the data, and then we were able to reconstruct where each buoy went while it was underwater in this current.
The buoys had some surprising information to share.
The data showed that the current didn't follow the path that Amy thought it would.
Instead, it broke into pieces.
And these are not small pieces.
These are big pieces that are maybe 50 miles wide.
Circular, we call them eddies, sort of swirling vortex. They discovered these eddies can capture warm seawater and transport it all the way across the Atlantic, like little swirling islands.
So currents aren't just the rivers, they're the islands.
I guess when you're talking about just a bunch of water it's...
It's pretty fluid. Haha.
So to speak. But like Amy says, we can't see how the ocean works, and bit by bit, sound is revealing what's going on deep beneath the waves.
Yeah, because let's face it.
Moving water in more water is kind of hard to see.
And that's not the only way that Amy's using sound to study the oceans.
After this quick break, we'll continue on our scavenger hunt to find out how Amy uses sound to understand her data and why she wants to share it with everyone.
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Hello! We want to recommend our podcast, don't we, Rowan.
We do, Penny. It's called The World, The Universe and Us from New Scientist and it's your essential weekly dose of science and wonder, hosted by me, Dr Rowan Hooper.
And me, Dr Penny Sache.
Each week, we talk to the scientists in the news and draw on new scientists' unparalleled depth of reporting to put the stories that matter into context.
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The world, the universe and us – get it wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back and continuing on our scavenger hunt.
So, you just heard how Amy uses sound to help map ocean currents – but she also uses sound to understand the data and share it with others.
I'm doing some exploration of how we can use sound to quote unquote visualize data.
What does she mean visualize data?
Is she talking about using sound to be able to see what the data is telling us?
I'm confused. Yeah.
So, usually scientists turn the numbers from their data into visual forms, like charts and graphs, but that doesn't really work for Amy.
I am a blind scientist so in fact the data that I am collecting and measuring is now pretty difficult for me to see on a graph.
Amy became blind while she was training to become an oceanographer, so that led her to experiment with something called data sonification.
data sonification, that's a big word, is basically just translating numbers into sound.
Oh, that sounds really interesting.
So is it like, each number is a sound?
That's the basic idea.
Each number is assigned a frequency or pitch. Here's how Amy describes how it works.
And you say, okay, I'm gonna give that the frequency that sounds like, Okay.
So every time the number two comes up, there will be an ooh sound coming from my computer.
Then I say, okay the number four we're going to have ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh.
Okay. So every time number four comes up, this sound will be played by my computer.
So if you were just switching back from two to four to two to four, Now I usually have a lot more numbers than just two to four.
Right, I got a whole bunch of numbers.
And so you end up with something that might sound sort of like ooo, ooo, oo, ooo.
And that's telling me that the numbers are changing a lot across a particular range.
Oh man, that's so cool!
So instead of seeing numbers go up and down on a graph, you can hear them go up and down.
But did I hear one of those scavenger hunt sounds in there?
It sure sounded like it.
You did! It's Amy singing her numbers.
That's just one example of how data could sound.
There are other, much more sophisticated ways where you could, say, use different instrument sounds to represent different types of data.
Say, wind data could be a wind instrument.
And ocean data could be a horn.
All right, so you could have like a whole chorus or an orchestra of data.
Yeah, so you can get really creative and play around with data sonification.
There are a lot of cool projects to help share the sounds of data.
Amy's working on one for an underwater volcano. Do you wanna hear what it sounds like?
Of course. ah there we go that's the last sound the one that I've been wondering about since you played me it's rumbly glory at the very beginning.
You found all three but I still have to tell you more about it all right.
So this data came from a sensor that measures the pressure or force beneath the seafloor and it's right next to an underwater volcano. And it turns out that this volcano erupts every now and then.
Maybe every few years, five years or so.
When it's not erupting, the magma is building up under the sea floor.
And the sea floor is slowly rising, being pushed up by the magma underneath.
Wait, so the sea floor itself actually like physically moves up?
Yes! And the sensor measures that movement.
If you are a visual person in a visual display, you can see this rise and fall of the seafloor.
But if you're not a visual learner, or you're visually impaired, you can't see that.
So Amy wanted to figure out the best way to share the story of the seafloor data, with an explosive ending.
She worked with a sound designer to find a sound that both corresponded to the numbers of the data and actually felt like an undersea eruption.
And so, in this data you can see day after day, year after year the seafloor is rising up as the magma is growing, and then suddenly the nearby underwater volcano explodes.
And all the magma comes out of the magma chamber, out into the ocean, and the seafloor drops because the magma underneath is now gone.
That's incredible, I think hearing a volcano is probably a bit more fun than looking at a graph, though looking at graphs is really fun.
Different strokes for different folks as they say.
I guess. Different versions of the sonification add different information, like how much time has passed.
two thousand or a narration that works like a maps legend includes eruption sounds for the 1998, 2011 and 2015.
It really gives you all the information that a visual would but you process it through your ears instead of your eyes.
Exactly and that can be a very valuable perspective on data.
Scientists are finding out that the the ears actually can pick up information from the data that the eyes have more difficulty seeing.
The ears and the brain just work together differently in such a way that they can perceive patterns in the data that the eyes can't see.
I think that's pretty cool.
Oh, so you could actually hear something in the data that you might not see?
Yeah, plus it means that more people can experience science and be a part of it.
Amy wants everyone to be able to follow their curiosity like she did.
So I'm determined to help make science as accessible as possible for everyone.
Sounds like that's exactly what she's doing.
Yes, and it also sounds like we've come to the end of our sound science scavenger hunt.
You did a great job finding them all.
You know I was really tuned in, heavily focused, definitely a sound finding superstar.
I could see the sweat coming off your brow as you listened!
Now that you've learned how Ami converts data to sound, you can make your own data sonification!
Choose a different sound that you can make.
You can sing the sounds or make them with the objects around you, assign a number to each sound, and challenge your family to follow along with the numbers that you play.
it's sure to be a listening challenge.
Thanks today to Dr. Amy Bauer, senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
You can learn more about Amy's work on the bonus interview episode on our Patreon at patreon .com slash tumble podcast, and we'll have more free resources to learn about ocean currents and Amy's work to make ocean science accessible on the blog on our website.
Science podcast for kids calm.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant number 214711, engaging blind visually impaired and sighted students in STEM with storytelling through podcasts.
Special thanks to the team who helped with this episode, Dr. Peter Walters, Dr. Carrie Cipallo, Ashley Nabert, and the rest of the team at Independent Science.
Also, thanks to Dr. Kelly Redinger and Dr. Martin Stortztig at Oregon State University's STEM Research Center, as well as Dr. Timothy Spuck at AUI.
Also thanks to Nick Conte and Sharon Murphy for sending us those wonderful clarinet recordings.
Sarah Roberson -Lenz edited this show and designed all the episode art.
Peter Walters is our editorial consultant for this series.
Elliott Hajjaj is our production assistant.
And Gary Calhoun -James engineered and mixed this episode.
I'm Lindsay Patterson, and I wrote this episode and I'm Marshall Esquimia And I did all the music and sound design for this episode tumble is a production of tumble media Thanks for listening and stay tuned for more stories of science discovery Hey, everybody here We are at the end of the episode and that means that it's time to wish some happy birthdays to all of our great supporters out on Patreon.
But before we get there, we've got some new Patreon supporters to call out.
Seth and Josie, thanks so much to both of you for your generous support.
We really appreciate it.
And now, on to some birthdays.
First, a very happy birthday on May 8th to Maria and Hazel.
We're all so proud of you budding scientists.
Happy birthday on May 9th to Joaquin, Mom, Dad, and Lola love you very much. A very, very, very happy birthday to Henry on May 9th.
Thanks so much, Henry, for your continuing support from your podcast. A happy May 15th birthday to Seth.
Whether you're building epic Redstone contraptions in Minecraft, or outsmarting your family at chess, your curiosity and creativity makes the world a more awesome place.
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A very happy birthday on May 20th.
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Mom loves you to infinity.
She's so proud of the scientists that you already have become.
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