What can we learn about the history of humanity through the sounds of space?

These ideas that were from 500 years ago, a thousand years ago,

really can like change your perspective on these truths that you thought you knew.

It's Wednesday, February 14th, happy Valentine's Day and happy Science Friday. I'm Scifry producer Deep Peter Schmidt. How do we make sense of staring into the vast expanse above our heads,

the millions of stars we might be able to see in the billions more we can't?

Well, listening to the sounds from the stars might help.

A recent podcast series from the World According to sound dives into the sonification of space data through the history of astronomy through ancient Babylon to the Hubble telescope.

Guest host John Dancoski sits down with the podcast to host to find out what they learned and how it made

them see the universe in a different light.

Sam Harnet and Chris Hoff, welcome back to Science Friday.

Thanks so much for joining us.

Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. So let's start with the idea behind this project. It's part of a podcast about the humanities. Now, science and humanities are often on different sides of the table or at least

different sides of the campus. How did you think about telling space stories

through this lens? Well I think that's the point is that they shouldn't be on

different sides of the table really I mean that was the

impetus for the project which is for some reason in our society science and the

humanities have been split and the point of the projects is to show that they

really are un-splitable if you look at the history of science.

Now, we're going to be hearing some of the space sounds you were working with in just a minute,

but maybe the both of you can take me through how you decided on the stories about the history of astronomy that you wanted to tell here.

Yeah, we actually had some help from the Johns Hopkins Humanities Center there called the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute and they have people in the humanities and astrophysics there that kind of helped us create this list and then we kind of paired it down to what we wanted to do. But really it became clear to us that we had to sort of do, you know, a kind of expansive history of it and like starting, you know, from ancient times and going up to the modern times to really show this evolution of like how the humanities were intertwined with

astrophysics you know since the beginning of the written record all the way up to now to

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