The Ripples blog published a very nice post about “sonifying” the Mandelbrot set. The resulting sound files (linked in the post) are quite interesting, especially the “SlowDivergence” soundbite. The post also tipped me off about playitbyr, an R package that converts a data.frame (a table of values) into an auditory graph. The soundbites demoed on the webpage are really cool — you should check them out!
The “classic” version of Systemic (v1, Java) has a feature for sonifying the orbital dynamics of exoplanets, originally written by Aaron Wolf (now a Turner Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan).
Non-interacting planets only generate pure sine-wave tones — not very interesting. It gets much more exciting once you introduce planetary interactions. Resonant and unstable systems, in particular, generate much more delicate or dramatic samples. Oklo.org has a few posts about the sonification feature, with downloadable soundbites.
I have not been a very good steward of this feature — it didn’t make it into Systemic2 (or the web app) since I didn’t want to work on migrating the Java code. The existence of playitbyr, though, means I do not have to reinvent the wheel, definitely reigniting my interest in implementing this feature!
[Via R-bloggers.]