The 2024 solar eclipse has captured the eyes of people around the world — and now their ears, too.
The Perkins Library, based out of Watertown’s Perkins School for the Blind, held a Zoom event to capture and stream the celestial event for the visually impaired. It used a method known as the “sonification” of data so that attendees could experience the progression of the eclipse throughout the afternoon.
The event streamed the eclipse through a LightSound, an iPhone-shaped device that converts light intensity into sound.
Harvard University astronomer Allyson Bieryla got the idea to develop LightSound devices in preparation for a field trip with her students to celebrate the summer 2017 solar eclipse. She was hoping to make astronomy more accessible to people with physical disabilities.
“Somebody mentioned that I should reach out to Wanda Díaz-Merced. ... Turns out, she’s a blind astronomer that uses sonification for her research,” Bieryla said. “We wanted to build something that’s easy to build, inexpensive, that we could make and distribute widely.”
Daniel Davis, who works in lecture demonstration at Harvard, says that LightSound devices aren’t just progressive in their technological advancement but also socially.
“Experiencing a phenomenon in isolation can be very isolating and very lonely,” Davis said. “And so making a device like that can convert light levels into sound actually lets the blind and low-vision community partake in the eclipse with others so that they feel included in the process and also so that they can exchange ideas and appreciation for the event.”
Bieryla says that sonification is not more challenging than gathering visual data since the both processes are just “measuring numbers.” The light sensor, she explained, is simply measuring the changing brightness as the sun gets eclipsed by the moon.
“Many sighted astronomers might just take that data and make a plot with it, but there’s no reason you can’t take those numbers and make sound out of it,” Bieryla said.
Several dozen people joined the Zoom call to listen as the eclipse peaked at 3:29 p.m., with the dimming light fluctuating between two tones — “like Jaws,” one observer joked.
Bieryla says she wants to expand the number of LightSound devices globally so that more people can use them in future eclipses. In 2026, for instance, another total solar eclipse will be visible from Iceland, Greenland and Spain.
“One of the things is just having the resources. There’s no reason that a person without sight can’t do astronomy or can’t study astronomy,” Bieryla said. “Yes, it’s thought of often as a visual science, but that doesn’t mean we can’t interpret data differently — ’cause when it comes down to it, we’re all just interpreting numbers or data.”
