Science and Culture: Musicians join scientists to explore data through sound.

Composer Margaret Schedel grew up with a mathematically minded father who had a fondness for flow charts. “He’d say, ‘You can’t remember how to do the laundry? Make a flow chart!’” Schedel recalls. Like her father, Schedel was fascinated by computer science, but her dyslexia made programming challenging. “I think I have a logical brain, but one that is a different kind of logic.” Today, as a professor in themusic department at Stony Brook University in New York, Schedel relies on that logic along with her musical training to help researchers across her university hear their data. Schedel is one of many musicians and researchers working in data sonification, a field focused on translating data into sound. That might mean sonifying proteins by assigning a chord to each amino acid (1), climate data by increasing pitch with temperature (2), or even neighborhood income levels along a subway line by assigning different sorts of instruments (https:// datadrivendj.com/tracks/subway). The end goal: deep insights into data revealed through sound.