Dr Wanda L. Díaz-Merced
After losing her sight, she became an advocate for the sonification of astrophysical data
Born and raised in Gurabo, Puerto Rico, DíazMerced grew up playing with her sister, where they would pretend to fly their spacecraft to distant galaxies. At school she had an avid interest in science, and after winning second prize at a science fair she gained the confidence to believe that a career as a scientist was possible. To fulfil her dream, she enrolled at the University of Puerto Rico to study physics.
It was during her time at university that DíazMerced’s path to become a scientist would take a rather different route; the sight loss she had begun experiencing during her adolescence rapidly advanced, leaving her blind.
Determined not to be beaten, Díaz-Merced persevered with her studies, repeated classes and overcame a myriad of obstacles. However, a career as a scientist began to look out of reach as Díaz-Merced struggled to access the same quality of education as her able-visioned classmates.
One day a friend played Díaz-Merced an audio recording created from data from a solar flare. This ignited something inside Díaz-Merced, who soon realised that visual interpretation of data was not the only way.
Data can be translated into sound in a process known as sonification, whereby pitch, volume or rhythm can be used to distinguish between data values. Díaz-Merced soon began to investigate how our ears could detect patterns in data that could otherwise be obscured by graphs and visual representations. But Díaz-Merced was not the first to realise the benefits of sonification. Radio astronomer Karl Jansky used it to listen to the cosmos in the 1930s, but as visual data interpretation techniques advanced, sonification somewhat fell by the wayside.
Fuelled by a passion for the sonification of astrophysical data and making it more accessible to everyone, Díaz-Merced applied for an internship with heliophysicist Robert Candey at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland while she was still studying for her bachelor’s. During the internship, Díaz-Merced was involved in developing a prototype data analysis tool that would help to acquaint the visually impaired with space-physics data. The software would convert astronomical data into sound and allow for audible interpretation of data. The internship was a great success. She then returned to her studies, and after six years of hard work she completed her bachelor’s degree in physics.
Díaz-Merced continued to be involved in astrophysical research at Goddard while she completed a PhD in computer science at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. During her PhD, Díaz-Merced took sonification to a whole new level. She set out on a mission to test whether the software she had been working on at NASA would prove useful to the general science community. To test this, Díaz-Merced presented scientists with simulated data of astronomical spectra and asked them to look for the telltale double peak that stipulates the presence of a black hole. She had users try to identify signals from visual-only data, sound-only data and then a combination of the two. The experiment was a resounding success, showing that when you combine both audio and visual information your sensitivity to a signal is heightened. Díaz-Merced proved that the sonification of data is not only beneficial to those that are visually impaired, but to everyone.
Díaz-Merced has since travelled the world promoting sonification of astrophysical data and is a leading advocate for ensuring access to astronomy is available to all. “I think that science is for everyone. It belongs to the people, and it has to be available to everyone because we are all natural explorers,” she said to an audience during her TED Talk in 2016.