On August 21, 2017, Kiki Smith’s teenage sons giddily prepared to look at the partial solar eclipse in Rochester, New York. As Mrs. Smith listened to their conversations, she felt omitted.
“I felt very lonely,” she said. Mrs. Smith was diagnosed with a degenerative disease as a child and lost her eyesight in 2011. The local eclipse confusion and national media attention unexpectedly touched nerves.
The eclipse “was about experiencing a historic moment in the community, and I wasn’t a part of it,” she said.
Ms. Smith, 52, who works for a community development organization in Rochester, decided to do things in another way for the total solar eclipse that will cross her city on April 8. Assists in organizing a public meeting that prioritizes accessibility for individuals with vision loss. Her event will feature specially designed devices called LightSound that transform changing light intensity into musical sounds, enabling blind and visually impaired people to hear the sky darken after which brighten again.
During this eclipse, Mrs. Smith said, “I will be with the community. I will have all these great resources at my fingertips to experience things I thought I missed last time.”
People with limited vision or blindness across the United States will experience the eclipse using roughly 900 LightSound devices distributed by a team led by Allyson Bieryl, an astronomer at Harvard University.
The instrument was developed in 2017 by Ms. Bieryla, head of Harvard’s undergraduate astronomy and telescope laboratory, and Wanda Díaz Merced, a blind astronomer then working on the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Having learned in regards to the needs of astronomers with visual impairments, Mrs. Bieryla equipped the laboratory she runs with a printer that creates three-dimensional, tactile representations of images recorded by telescopes on thermosensitive paper. Dr. Díaz Merced has been conducting research using sonification, during which mathematical data is translated into sounds, for over ten years.
The two decided to create a device to sonicate the eclipse this summer. Daniel Davis, director of Harvard’s scientific demonstration laboratory, created the prototype.
On August 21, as a total solar eclipse omitted her statement post in Wyoming, Ms. Bieryla streamed audio from the device over the Internet.
Dr. Díaz Merced was in Cape Town on the time as a research fellow on the Astronomy Office for Development. During the eclipse, she shared the printed with students from Athlone School for the Blind.
“When they heard it, they jumped up and clapped,” she added. “It was the first time they were able to hear an event like this, so it was very telling.”
LightSound, in regards to the size of a paperback novel, incorporates a light sensor that measures the brightness of the sky in lux, or units of illumination. Inside the housing, code on the microcontroller board assigns individual sounds to numerical lux ranges. The synthesizer then generates a flute sound for the extreme light, a clarinet sound that lowers as the sunshine fades, and a slow, percussive click within the darkness of totality. Listeners use headphones or a loudspeaker to hear the sound of the device.
Before the total solar eclipse that swept over Chile and Argentina on July 2, 2019, Ms. Bieryla’s team, funded by the International Astronomical Union, sent devices or their components to colleagues in each countries. During the event on the Santiago Planetarium, organizers connected the LightSound device to an amplification system in order that greater than 1,500 participants, including blind people, could hear it.
“It’s not just for the visually impaired,” said Paulina Troncoso, director of the scholar astronomy program on the Universidad Central Región de Coquimbo, who led the LightSound portion of the event. “This is for everyone too.”
The team is offering LightSound at no cost and has published computer code and directions for constructing the devices online. Ms. Bieryla’s group continues to work on the product to enhance user experience. For example, the 2017 prototype emitted a quite shrill tone. In 2018, Sóley Hyman, then a Harvard student, redesigned the device to incorporate a synthesizer board and developed code for flute, clarinet and click on sounds.
One of Dr. Troncoso’s students experimented with reprogramming the board to make use of a simplified instrumental version Daft Punk’s 1997 song “Around the World”. As the sunshine fades, the synthesized instruments turn off one after the other, leaving only the sound of the drum machine.
Last yr, Ms. Bieryla invited Elliot Richards, a Harvard engineer, to revamp the device with a circuit board as a substitute of a tangle of wires. The change makes constructing the devices much easier, and Ms. Bieryla and Ms. Hyman, now a student on the University of Arizona, taught volunteers the best way to solder and assemble materials at several workshops.
Once people understand how LightSound is sharing the eclipse, they will be willing to help, Ms. Bieryla said.
“It uplifted me – the sheer amount of work people put into this project and the excitement surrounding it,” she said.
On a sunny Saturday in March, a dozen or so volunteers sat hunched over tables in a classroom on the Austin Nature & Science Center in Texas, using soldering irons to connect components to circuit boards. The pungent smell of hot metal wafted through the open door as a mockingbird trilled from a nearby tree. As volunteers tested their accomplished devices, the overlapping notes of the flute and clarinet resembled the noise of an orchestra tuned for a performance.
Mark Sullivan, who works as a welder, came upon in regards to the workshop through a local astronomy club and decided to help. Mr. Sullivan witnessed the total solar eclipse in Nashville in August 2017.
People like him who can see “just take it for granted that they can look at the sun during an eclipse,” he said, adding: “You want to make sure everyone has that opportunity.”
Ms. Bieryla’s team received over 2,500 inquiries about LightSound devices. She sent as much as she could to event organizers like Mrs. Smith in Rochester; to libraries, museums, universities and senior centers; and to colleges for the blind.
On April 8 in Austin, the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired will host an “eclipse extravaganza” featuring tactile eclipse diagrams and LightSound devices. Yuki Hatch, a Twelfth-grade student at the varsity, said that with the LightSound device, she won’t should depend on her limited vision to experience the total eclipse.
Mrs. Hatch loves astronomy and in October she watched the annular eclipse that passed through Texas. But all she saw was a dot that dimmed and brightened.
LightSound “will actually give me more information than I can see with my eyeballs,” she said.
Ms. Hatch plans to pursue a degree in computer science and develop technology that NASA can use to send blind people into space.
When Ms. Smith was a freshman in college, she wandered through an astronomy course until the lack of her eyesight made it too difficult. The LightSound device signals an encouraging shift towards support and inclusion, she said.
Allowing those that can’t see the eclipse to hear the eclipse is “an opportunity for kids not to give up on things like this,” she added.
