Below are the text descriptions of each of the three sonifications provided to survey participants as captions.

Text Description for Galactic Center Sonification:
The Galactic Center project brings the center of the Milky Way to listeners for the first time. This sonification begins on the left side of the image and moves to the right, with the sounds representing the position and brightness of the sources. The light of objects located towards the top of the image is heard as higher pitches while the intensity of the light controls the volume. Stars and other objects are converted to individual notes, while extended clouds of gas and dust produce a  drone-like sound. The crescendo happens when we reach the bright region to the lower right of the image. This is where the 4-million-solar-mass supermassive black hole at the center of the Galaxy, known as Sagittarius A* (A-star), resides, and where the clouds of gas and dust are the brightest.

You can listen to data from this region, roughly 400 light years across, either as "solos" from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, Hubble Space Telescope, and Spitzer Space Telescope, or together as an ensemble in which each telescope plays a different instrument. Each image reveals different phenomena happening in this region about 26,000 light years from Earth. The Hubble image outlines energetic regions where stars are being born, while Spitzer's infrared data show glowing clouds of dust containing complex structures. X-rays from Chandra reveal gas heated to millions of degrees from stellar explosions and outflows from Sagittarius A*.

Text Description for Cassiopeia A:
This supernova, or exploded star, is called Cassiopeia A (Cas A, for short). In Cas A, the sounds are mapped to four elements found in the debris from the exploded star as well as other high-energy data. The distribution of silicon (red), sulfur (yellow), calcium (green), and iron (purple) are revealed moving outward from the center of the remnant, starting from the location of the neutron star, in four different directions, with intensity again controlling the volume.

Text Description for Chandra Deep Field:
This is the deepest X-ray image ever obtained, made with over 7 million seconds of observing time with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. These data give astronomers the best glimpse yet at the growth of black holes over billions of years beginning soon after the Big Bang.

The object is called the Chandra Deep Field-South, and covers a region on the sky with an area about two-thirds that of the full Moon. The colors represent different levels of X-ray energy detected by Chandra. Here the lowest-energy X-rays are red, the medium band is green, and the highest-energy X-rays observed by Chandra are blue. Each color has been mapped to corresponding sounds in low, medium and high tones.

This data set contains the highest concentration of supermassive black holes ever seen, equivalent to about 5,000 objects that would fit into the area on the sky covered by the full Moon and about a billion over the entire sky. Play the sonification to listen to the location of thousands of black holes as detected in X-ray light.