Sonification

Surprisingly enough, ixpeobssim comes with built-in sonification facilities. The xpsonify application allows to tranform a given event list (in the form of a level-2 FITS file) into a midi and/or wave file.

More precisely, the event list is transformed into a MIDI file, which can in turn be played with any MIDI sequencer, or tranformed into an audio file using a virtual (or real, for what it’s worth) synthetizer.

New in version 19.5.0: First version of the sonification facilities.

New in version 19.6.0: Minimal support for audio-video animations added.

Manifesto: listening to the X-ray Universe in stereo

The ideas behind the IXPE-specific sonification facilities are hardly new. It is customary to transform particles in notes by translating the energy into a frequency—for photons this is really straightforward, as there is a perfect analogy between electromagnetic and acoustic waves.

When examined from the standpoint of its spectral response, IXPE is peculiar in that the standard band-pass for scientific analysis (2–8 keV) corresponds to exactly 2 octaves, comparable to the typical vocal range of a singer. The extended band in which we define the instrument response (1–12 keV) is in slight excess of 3.5 octaves, which is pretty much the same as the range of an acoustic guitar. Phrased in a slightly different way, the IXPE dynamics is comparable with that of typical musical instruments, which makes the conversion between energy and pitch very natural.

When translating X-ray photons into musical notes, pitch is not the only thing that we care about. Notes comes with at least three additional properties that need to be defined:

• velocity: a measure of how vigorously the player initially presses a key on the keyboard, to use a piano analogy—the note is louder when the key is struck more forcefully (and there are other subtle tonal differences, as well);

• duration: the time difference between the key press and release;

• pan: the location of the sound within the stereo field of the instrument (e.g., left, right, center).

The pan is where IXPE really shines. The IXPE polarization-sensitive detectors are unique in that they not only provide a time, energy and direction in the sky for each photon—they also provide a proxy of the photon polarization in the form of the azimuthal angle of emission of the photoelectron. Being an angle in the plane, this can be mapped in a straightforward way into a point in a stereo field, i.e., a position in the left-center-right space. This is something that has essentially no parallel in the vast majority of previously flown X-ray detectors.

In a sense, IXPE allows us to listen to the Universe in stereo for the first time.

Installation

Working with audio files requires a couple more Python packages on top of the standard ixpeobssim dependencies. Since this feature is not of general interest, these packages are not covered in the installations instructions, and are not included in the requirement file. If you try and run the sonification code without the relevant dependencies, you should get sensible error messages pointing you in the right direction, but essentially everything boils down to two things:

• mido, a MIDI manipulation Python library;

• fluidsynth, a cross-platform software synthesizer based on the SoundFont 2 specifications.

Note

If you’re mot familiar with music production, you can picture a MIDI file as a LaTeX source file, and fluidsynth like a typesetting engine producing output pdf document ready for visualization. The fonts in this process are called _soundfonts_.

Being mido a pure-Python package, installing it should be as easy as

pip install --user mido

For fluidsynth you should refer to the online documentation. If, e.g., you’re running a GNU Linux Fedora distribution you are all set:

sudo dnf install fluidsynth

In addition, you will also need some soundfonts—after all, fluidsynth is the rough equivalent of a typesetting system like LaTeX, and you cant’t do much without fonts. If you get an error message sounding like

fluidsynth: error: fluid_is_soundfont(): fopen() failed: 'File does not exist.'
...
fluidsynth: error: Failed to load SoundFont "/usr/share/soundfonts/default.sf2"
Rendering audio to file '/home/lbaldini/ixpeobssimdata/toy_point_source_du1.wav'..
fluidsynth: warning: No preset found on channel 0 [bank=0 prog=98]

this is almost certainly your problem. You distro might include some soundfont bank out of the box

sudo dnf install fluid-soundfont*

Alternatively, there’s plenty of place out there where you can find General MIDI soundfonts banks—just start from here.

The animation facilities are based on the matplotlib animation module, and you will need ffmpeg, a cross-platform, open-source video recording and editing software. Again, if you’re running a GNU Linux Fedora distribution you are all set:

sudo dnf install ffmpeg

(Otherwise refer to the documentation online.)

Sonification in details

Warning

This section is a stub.

xpsonify provides a large variety of settings to translate the properties of the X-rays impinging on the gas pixel detector into notes.

The velocity is determined by the fractional amount of energy released in the active volume—the photoelectron track is not always fully collected, and, at any given energy, the amount of energy collected by the detector is a sensible analogous to how hard the piano player presses the keys.

The note duration can be related to the track size in the detector or, more precisely, to the number of pixels in the region of interest for the readout: the larger the readout window, the longer it takes to the readout electronics for processing, formatting and transferring out the track.

The pan is determined by the photoelectron azimuthal angle, as explained in the beginning of the section.

Note

There are others expressive means that the MIDI protocol offers (such as the aftertouch), and could be incorporated into the sonification process in the future, assuming they are not too subtle to be effective.

API

Most of the relevant API dealing with sonification are include in the ixpeobssim.evt.animate and ixpeobssim.evt.sonification Python modules.