When Dr. Wanda Díaz-Merced was a little girl, she “always wanted to know all the whys… I wanted to know the reasoning behind things, not only that leaves are green because of chlorophyll and sunlight, but how did you test it?”
In college, Dr. Díaz-Merced's fell in love with astronomy when she discovered a NASA project called Radio JOVE which helps amateur scientists detect and study radio emissions from space. Today, Dr. Díaz-Merced is an astrophysicist known for her groundbreaking work in space sonification, the process of converting data from planets, stars, suns, and black holes into sound so we can better understand the universe. Dr. Díaz-Merced also happens to be blind.
An Determined Astronomer
Dr. Díaz-Merced's story is a profound reminder that great scientists can come from anywhere. She grew up in a small town in Puerto Rico, and while her parents encouraged her and her sister’s interest in the “whys,” they themselves had not gone beyond secondary school. When Dr. Díaz-Merced was a child, she developed juvenile diabetes. She was in and out of the hospital, and her family had to work hard to afford her insulin.
Ultimately, Dr. Díaz-Merced's passion for science led her to study computer science at the University of Puerto Rico, which was where she began to go blind from diabetic retinopathy. Her ability to see equations on the board started to deteriorate, and soon she could only hear the chalk on the board. Wanda says she felt “like a bug, lost inside a tin can trying to find an exit. My world was shrinking exponentially.”
Then she discovered sonification — the process of being able to hear astronomical data. She was encouraged to apply for an internship at NASA and was accepted into a PhD program at the University of Glasgow, where her thesis focused on proving the value of sonification as a research tool.
From the beginning, Dr. Díaz-Merced says she felt it was critical for her to focus on research, “not on just giving my experience of becoming blind… No, I want to talk about this is how I listen to the audio, and this is the mathematics that I extract from listening to the audio… And this is the new science emerging from the audio.” She says she wanted to produce documentary proof of sonification’s usefulness in astrophysics, not just for someone who was blind but for the field in general. The journey wasn’t easy. “You just keep trying… and you keep working on becoming outstanding and outstandingness is something that doesn’t become a reality overnight.”
Understanding Data Better Through Sound
Many of us absorb most data mono-sensorially. In school, we study charts and graphs. At work, we might gather information and turn it into displays for presentations. We assume that visual representation is the best way to understand all information. But what if it isn’t?
It turns out that sonification can help us understand some complex data sets better by leveraging our auditory perceptions to identify patterns, trends, and anomalies that we might not perceive visually. Think of all the instruments and patterns we hear when Beethoven is played by a symphony orchestra, or all the layers of sound we hear — music, retreating footsteps, a dog barking, countless sounds — watching a movie at the local cineplex. Sonification takes advantage of humans’ extraordinary ability to process all these sounds.
Sonification is now being applied not only to astronomy, but to other scientific fields like medicine and climate. Dr. Díaz-Merced has recently started collaborating with scientists across the globe who are working to improve diagnoses, decipher brain activity, and predict storms — all through sonification.
The Music of the Spheres
Dr. Díaz-Merced's enthusiasm for astrophysics is contagious. She makes you want to hear “the music of the spheres.” Her current research includes work on the brightness of stars, variations in cosmic rays, and the detection of gravitational waves. Below is a sonification she created of a coronal mass ejection, a sudden emission of energy from the sun as it crashed into a constellation of satellites, one after another to finally arrive in our atmosphere where it was detected by Dr. Díaz-Merced's backyard radio telescope.
Listen to a sound clip of Sonification.mp3
Over the last ten years, Dr. Díaz-Merced has collaborated with scientists at institutions around the world including the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, and the South Africa Astronomical Observatory’s Office of Astronomy for Development. In South Africa, hoping to develop a new generation of scientists, she taught astronomy and sonification to students at the Athlone School of the Blind.
Increasing the Pool of Scientists
Dr. Díaz-Merced will always be an astrophysicist, but she now has a second scientific mission. She wants to push the development of multi-sensorial technology — not just sonification, but haptics, which is technology that uses touch and motion. She says that too much of technological and scientific development is still thinking in a mono-sensorial way, which is limiting both how fast we advance science, and critically, who becomes a scientist by limiting the contributions of the 1 in 6 of us who are persons with disabilities.
Dr. Díaz-Merced's goal is “to transform the scientific mono-sensorial economy into a scientific multi-sensorial economy.” And she wants our help. She says it is time to change the thinking around persons with disabilities from “being beneficiaries to becoming benefactors.” Dr. Díaz-Merced is a benefactor to astrophysics, whose work has advanced and enriched the field. She adds, “we have evidence from our experiments that there are performance styles that are not being used, that are autonomously used by people with disabilities… if this would have been included from the very beginning, it would have been completely different.” She claims that by making scientific research accessible and inclusive, the rewards will be discoveries and knowledge that benefit us all.