Auralization of Magnetic Multiscale Satellite Data: Toward Integrated Audification in Space Science

Audification has an established history in the field of space science, with events such as “lion roars” and “whistlers” drawing their names from auditory observations. As of 2019, NASA’s CDAWeb repository provides audified versions of observations from spacecraft and ground-based instruments as a standard data product. This approach can be extended further through spatialized audio (auralization) of data from multiple sensors. However, there are not currently standardized tools available for spatially rendering audified multispacecraft observations. Here, we demonstrate an auralization of magnetometer data from NASA’s  Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) Mission, produced using open-source tools in python. Each spacecraft’s audified data is played by a virtual sound source with a location matching the physical arrangement of that spacecraft. This is used to generate a binaural rendering optimized for playback over headphones. This approach eliminates the need for specialized tools, improving access for citizen scientists. It lays a foundation for standardized auralizations of distributed instrumentation systems, both for use in space science research and for systematically evaluating the effectiveness of auralization methods, and supports ongoing work with ground-based magnetometers in polar regions.