Space Weather Sonification for scientists, educators, and musicians

The Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) Mission will be launched in 2006 in order to understand the origin and consequences of Coronal Mass Ejections (CME's). Two spacecrafts will orbit the Sun with instruments imaging the Sun and instruments measuring in-situ particle and fields. In preparation for the data gathered by the STEREO instruments, we have developed software to convert this space weather data into sound, a process known as sonification. We will show how this sonification project has been adapted to serve not only educators and the public wanting to hear data gathered from space, but also to serve the needs of scientists and musicians. Three separate software programs have been created in the Max/MSP programming language to map bins of data to musical sounds. This mapping varies from converting data to simple frequencies to converting the data to complicated filtered musical resonances. One program is designed for use in the classroom as well as for use as a tutorial for those new to sonification. A second program is designed for use by scientists who want to study data from the two STEREO spacecraft. And a third program is designed for use by musicians to use space weather data as an input to musical compositions. This project is part of the Education and Public Outreach (E/PO) component of the STEREO In-situ Measurements of Particles and CME Transients (IMPACT) suite of seven instruments with additional support from the STEREO/WAVES instrument suite.