0:01

Hi, I'm Lindsay.

0:03

And I'm Marshall. Welcome to Tumble, the show where

0:05

we explore stories of science discovery.

0:07

Today, we're looking to the sky to

0:10

explore the cosmos in a whole new

0:12

way. Ooh, we're sending alpacas

0:14

this time. Alpacastronauts.

0:17

No.

0:19

We're going to find out

0:21

how we can stargaze

0:23

by sound and learn how

0:25

one computer scientist is looking to

0:27

open up the universe for everyone.

0:32

Neptune.

0:34

Aquarius. Saturn.

0:37

Magnifying. What are we listening

0:40

to? And what's that robot voice? Can

0:42

you tell? We're flying into Saturn.

0:45

Into Saturn? I don't want to fly into Saturn.

0:47

We'll get crushed. Oh no. Marshall,

0:50

calm down. This is a safe way to

0:52

explore our solar system. Oh, you know,

0:54

yeah. I just noticed that we're not literally in a spaceship

0:57

right now. We are in fact in our

0:59

studio, just recording. How

1:02

could I miss that?

1:04

Uranus. Venus. Magnifying.

1:09

What we're hearing is Astreos, an

1:11

astronomy app that's designed to be navigated

1:14

completely by sound. And

1:16

it was created by this computer

1:18

engineer.

1:20

My name is Yuma-Antoine Ducault,

1:22

but you can call me Yuma. Like

1:25

Yuma, Arizona. Oh, so he's like

1:28

a Wild West guy. Yuma

1:30

doesn't live in Arizona. He's actually on the

1:33

other side of the world in Australia.

1:35

But he's definitely on the frontier

1:38

of astronomy.

1:40

I try to understand

1:43

the stars by listening

1:45

to them and touching them.

1:48

So I'm going to assume he's not literally

1:51

talking about touching the stars because that would be

1:53

difficult for lots of reasons. And

1:56

I don't have a branch to extend

1:58

my arm.

2:00

to the stars yet.

2:02

Yuma brings the stars down

2:04

to Earth and into our hands

2:07

through technology. How does he do

2:09

that? Well, the first step of

2:11

answering that question is to find out why

2:14

he does that. And it begins

2:16

on a starry night where Yuma grew up

2:19

in southern France.

2:20

While I was six years old, actually,

2:23

and my parents in France gave me

2:25

a telescope with some science books

2:28

and like a book on the solar system.

2:30

Yuma's new book described how he could

2:32

find Saturn in its rings through

2:34

the telescope. So one starry

2:37

night, he decided to try and see for

2:39

himself. He set his alarm for 3

2:41

a.m.

2:42

So I woke up around 3 o'clock

2:44

and I looked at the sky. I was very

2:47

sleepy and everything. But then

2:49

the illumination and the brightness of the strip

2:52

of stars across the sky was

2:54

something I would really recommend everybody to

2:57

do.

2:57

Already amazed by the Milky

2:59

Way, Yuma began searching

3:01

for Saturn with help from the book. Peering

3:04

through his telescope, he found it.

3:06

It was just a bright,

3:09

orangish dot

3:10

in darkness. And I was zooming in with

3:12

the telescope and I was changing the

3:15

focus so I could get as much clarity as possible.

3:18

As Yuma focused in, he watched the

3:20

orangish dot transform into something

3:22

he'll never forget. It

3:25

kind of turned into this dot, but

3:27

with something that sort

3:29

of striked across

3:31

it diagonally. He realized

3:33

he was looking at Saturn's rings right

3:36

there in front of him. Wow,

3:39

so he's just 6 years old and he's already

3:41

woken up in the middle of the night and found Saturn

3:43

on his own.

3:44

Yeah, what he saw

3:46

through the telescope that night stuck

3:49

with him. The image of

3:51

Saturn just stayed with me even

3:53

in the dark. I just kept thinking

3:55

about it and I kept wondering

3:58

what kind of worlds would be. there and what

4:01

it would be like. Yuma had the feeling

4:03

that Earth was not alone. All those

4:06

planets were out there with us.

4:09

It's

4:09

almost comforting. It's

4:11

an amazing feeling. I mean, yeah, I

4:13

think the more you learn about the universe, the more

4:15

kind of amazing it is that we're here.

4:18

Yeah, and Yuma's imagination

4:20

got charged up thinking about space.

4:24

It was the idea of exploring

4:26

those worlds close up that grabbed

4:28

him first. He got into science

4:30

fiction,

4:31

as many of us do. The

4:34

whole sci-fi world to me

4:36

was fascinating. That's kind of an extension

4:38

of me being introduced to the stars.

4:40

I used to create spaceships and

4:43

full worlds.

4:44

Yuma would draw spaceships and

4:46

alien planets on paper, then

4:48

translate his ideas onto

4:50

the computer.

4:51

And then I was designing

4:53

all of that in 3D. Wow,

4:55

Yuma sounds like a pretty impressive person, I gotta

4:58

say.

4:58

Yeah,

5:01

he is. And for Yuma,

5:03

computers became a creative outlet

5:06

for his space explorations. He

5:08

loved building out of his imagination

5:11

and curiosity.

5:12

I was into, you

5:14

know, a lot of, I guess, animation and

5:16

architecture, a lot of visual things.

5:19

But that changed when he lost

5:21

his sight. And if we went

5:23

forward to, like, recently,

5:26

let's say 13 years ago, when I lost my sight,

5:28

it's almost like, you know, taking the ability

5:31

of a pianist to play again.

5:32

Yeah, that's kind of like the story of Beethoven who lost

5:35

his hearing. But let me make sure

5:37

I understand what happened. So Yuma

5:39

was really inspired by seeing

5:41

the stars to design like these crazy

5:43

sci-fi worlds in his computer. And

5:45

then suddenly, he just can't see anymore.

5:48

That's

5:48

right. So what does he do next?

5:51

We'll find out how he changes

5:53

course after this short break.

5:57

Tumble is brought to you with support from Spotify for

5:59

pottery.

7:59

Here's an example. So

8:06

what are we hearing here? It's the sound

8:09

of a star. The signals coming

8:11

from it have been converted into sound

8:14

that we can hear and we're hearing

8:16

the star over time.

8:19

So besides like

8:21

being kind of like rumbly, what does this

8:23

sound tell us about the star? It's just

8:26

basically a perfectly well-oiled, perfectly

8:28

working machine with nothing happening

8:30

to it. So it's a boring star in

8:33

some ways.

8:35

If something was happening to the star,

8:37

you'll hear some change in the sound

8:39

instead of that steady rumble.

8:46

Compare that to this star.

8:55

I guess it sounds kind of like it's going like

8:58

up or down like wall wall wall

9:00

like something like that.

9:01

Yuma calls the down parts of

9:03

that wah wah sound a dip.

9:07

And it means that something else is

9:09

blocking the telescope from picking

9:12

up the light from the star. In

9:14

other words, something is passing

9:16

in front of it.

9:17

And so that's why you hear this dip kind

9:20

of occurring. So what

9:23

passes in front of a star like

9:25

a spaceship or a big rock or? It's

9:27

a planet. The

9:31

sound is representing the light

9:33

from the star changing because a planet

9:35

is in front of it. Here's a way to think

9:37

about it visually.

9:39

If you visualize, let's say

9:41

a lighthouse a kilometer away and at

9:45

night

9:46

and it's flashing, it's like to you, it's

9:48

not moving, it's just flashing. It's like to you, right?

9:51

And there's a mosquito that

9:54

is passing in front of it. You

9:56

wouldn't be able to see the mosquito. There's

9:59

no way. It's too small. Yeah,

10:01

you're not going to see a mosquito from even like 10 feet

10:04

away, let alone further than that. This

10:07

is the advantage of sound. You can hear

10:10

what you can't see.

10:13

So if a mosquito passed through and

10:15

then you transform that into a sound, the

10:17

sound is able to pick that up better

10:20

than a visual graph. Oh,

10:22

well, that's neat. So like you can hear

10:25

a small change in the signal better than

10:27

you could see it. Exactly. If

10:29

you were looking at charts and graphs of these

10:31

exoplanet signals, it would

10:33

take a good amount of time and expertise

10:36

to figure out what was happening. Plus,

10:39

our ears are just faster than our eyes.

10:42

You get a faster reaction from sound than from

10:44

visuals. What does that mean? Research

10:47

shows that our eyes are much slower at

10:49

processing information with our

10:52

brains compared to our sense of

10:54

sound.

10:55

Huh. That makes sense because it can

10:57

take a while to make sense of what we're seeing sometimes

10:59

because sometimes things look confusing. You're

11:02

like, is that a mushroom or

11:04

is that somebody? Is that a mushroom I can eat

11:07

or is it a bear that's attacking me? Can't

11:09

tell. Plus,

11:13

our ears are finely tuned for

11:15

detection. Our ears are

11:17

able to pick up an incredible

11:20

amount of detail in

11:22

sounds. Yeah, if you're getting good at paying

11:25

attention to what you're hearing, you can really notice a

11:27

lot of details.

11:28

Totally. So once Yuma

11:30

realized that astronomy could be studied

11:33

through sound, he also started thinking

11:35

about how he could still experience

11:37

stargazing like he did when he was

11:40

a kid with a telescope. And

11:42

the answer came through a conversation

11:44

with a friend.

11:45

We were in the garage and there was

11:47

a solar eclipse that was about to happen. Yuma

11:51

and his friend Jake are both engineers.

11:53

They often hung out in a garage coming

11:55

up with new ideas and inventions. And

11:58

they started talking about how you

13:56

vibes

14:00

are good. But

14:03

even that was not enough for Yuma.

14:05

He wanted to go deeper into space beyond

14:07

the stars and constellations. He

14:10

received an award to keep developing

14:12

his app into deep space.

14:15

They gave me the opportunity to speak to a

14:17

lot of experts in astrophysics and engineering

14:19

across the planet. He learned about

14:22

black holes, dark energy, and

14:24

ways of sonifying or using

14:27

sound to study astronomy.

14:29

That made me understand

14:31

that I had way more stuff that I needed

14:33

to learn and so I had to go back

14:35

to the drawing board multiple times. So

14:38

wait he had to start over? Yeah,

14:39

like he did with his 3D

14:41

sci-fi worlds. Yuma was continually

14:44

imagining how new things could be possible.

14:47

He had so many ideas.

14:49

And one of them was also to really make

14:51

something possible

14:53

to understand not just

14:55

to stargaze and to say this is pretty,

14:58

this is nice, this sounds good, but

15:00

to also be able to do something about it. What

15:02

does he mean by do something about it?

15:05

He means to actually be able to study

15:08

astronomy through sound for

15:10

everyone. People across

15:12

the planet who like the stars,

15:14

who want to know more about the stars, to allow

15:17

them to know the stars but

15:19

then to also potentially discover new

15:22

things up there in the sky.

15:25

So what types of things would you be able to discover without

15:27

even going to an observatory? Well

15:30

astronomy is really about data and

15:32

that data can go into the computer in

15:35

the form of sound. So just

15:37

like you would be looking at images from

15:39

a telescope, anyone who knows what

15:41

they're listening for can try to discover

15:44

something new.

15:45

Like what? Well someone wandering

15:48

through the stars could hear what

15:50

we heard before.

15:57

Could be the first to discover a

15:59

planet through

16:00

sound. So anyone

16:02

could discover a planet? Yeah,

16:05

Yuma's goal is to show that anyone

16:08

can have a role in exploring the universe

16:11

and make the universe available

16:13

for everybody.

16:15

There's so much data out there, it's so

16:17

rich that there's just not enough people

16:20

to understand all of the universe.

16:22

And so there's a lot of space. So

16:24

he means that there's space

16:27

in space. Yes. Like

16:29

it's roomy. There's

16:32

room for growth. And

16:35

Yuma's proof that you don't have

16:37

to be an astronomer to play

16:39

a very important role in

16:41

discovering space.

16:43

So as an engineer,

16:46

being interested in astrophysics

16:49

and astronomy, for me it's kind of a toy

16:51

store because I have all this data

16:53

that I can play with that I can understand

16:56

and I can, you know, kind of create different tools,

16:59

not just for myself but for others. I

17:01

really love the idea of the like astronomy

17:03

toy store where you can play around and put

17:06

things together just to see if people can use them.

17:08

Yeah, me too. And Yuma

17:10

says that building things has its own

17:12

process of discovery.

17:14

It's really, really

17:17

exciting to know that

17:19

you're building things that

17:21

has not been built before. It's

17:23

not the end which is the

17:26

exciting part, it's the journey through it which

17:28

is the exciting part.

17:29

In other words, Yuma's not done

17:31

building Astrias. Even though you can

17:34

use it now, he's always going to be

17:36

working to improve it and making it more

17:38

accessible.

17:39

Yeah, what a journey from building

17:41

worlds that were completely visual to reflecting

17:44

our entire universe through sound.

17:47

Yuma credits his ability to do that with

17:49

his inner motivation. It's

17:51

the same thing that got him up to see Saturn's

17:53

rings when he was six.

17:55

If you guys currently have

17:57

dreams and aspirations and you're thinking about

17:59

things... that you love, well,

18:01

they're never going to abandon you because they will always

18:04

be there with you throughout your life. It's

18:06

up to you to

18:07

keep building on them and then to

18:10

act upon them on the planet. That's

18:12

a great way to think of it, because you know, you don't have

18:14

to hold on to your dreams. They're just always

18:16

waiting there for you to do something about them.

18:19

Yeah, and Yuma's story shows

18:21

us that no matter what you end up

18:23

going through in your life, you can always

18:25

make them happen in whatever way

18:27

that's possible.

18:35

Now that you've learned how Yuma brought the stars

18:37

from sight to sound, think about how you

18:39

could experience constellations with senses

18:42

other than your sight.

18:43

You could recreate one of the 88

18:46

constellations, or even make up your

18:48

own. Map out stars using

18:50

objects with different sizes or textures,

18:54

or use scented markers or stickers

18:56

for different smells. Or

18:59

try using different sounds, like Yuma

19:01

used chimes.

19:02

Touch, smell, hear, or

19:04

even taste the stars with

19:06

a tasty constellation snack. Although

19:09

that last one would probably be a single-use constellation.

19:12

Let us know how you make your constellation

19:15

by emailing us at tumblepodcast

19:17

at gmail dot com. Thanks

19:20

today to Yuma, the co-founder

19:23

of OSIRIS, and special thanks

19:25

to Jake Dean, the other co-founder of

19:27

OSIRIS, for helping.

19:28

You can learn more about Yuma and his

19:30

work on the bonus interview episode on our Patreon

19:33

at patreon.com slash tumblepodcast.

19:36

And we'll have a link to where you can check out Astrios,

19:39

along with other free resources available

19:41

on the blog on our website, sciencepodcastforkids.com.

19:46

This material is based upon work

19:48

supported by the National Science Foundation under

19:50

Grant Number 2148711,

19:53

engaging blind, visually impaired, and sighted

19:56

students in STEM with storytelling through

19:58

podcasts.

19:59

Thanks to the team who helped with this episode,

20:02

Dr. Peter Walters, Dr. Kerry

20:04

Sepalo, and the team at

20:06

Independent Science. Also

20:08

thanks to Dr. Kelly Reidinger and Dr.

20:11

Martin Storkstieck at Oregon State University's

20:13

STEM Research Center, and Dr. Timothy

20:15

Spock at AUI.

20:17

Sarah Roberson-Lenz edited the show

20:19

and designed the episode art. Peter

20:21

Walters is our editorial consultant

20:24

for the series. Elliot Hajaj

20:26

is our production assistant, and Gary

20:28

Calhoun-James engineered and makes

20:30

this episode. I'm Lindsay Patterson,

20:33

and I wrote this episode.

20:34

And I'm Marshall Eschimia, and I made

20:36

all the music and sound design for this episode. Tumble

20:39

is a production of Tumble Media. Thanks

20:41

for listening, and stay tuned for more stories

20:44

of science discovery.

20:49

Thanks so much for listening to that episode, and now that it's

20:51

over, we've got some birthday shout outs to give to our supporters

20:53

on Patreon. First, happy May

20:56

14th birthday to Charlie Young, the

20:58

sweetest and most curious boy around. Mom and dad

21:01

love you and Tess to the moon

21:02

and back. Happy birthday to Alexis

21:05

Batson, also on May 14th.

21:07

Happy May 14th birthday to Leland Oak. Mom,

21:10

dad, and Ivy love the way you soak up

21:12

the world around you.

21:13

Happy May 14th birthday also to Charlie,

21:15

the future fighter pilot, who's happiest when

21:17

he's going Mach 2 with his hair on

21:19

fire. Gemma, happy birthday

21:22

on May 14th too, and it was great

21:24

chatting with you. Keep exploring, Mom

21:26

and dad and Mabel and Kensay, the cat,

21:28

love you. Joshua, happy May

21:31

16th birthday. Stay comfortable being

21:33

you, and keep asking those incredible questions. Rosalie,

21:36

happy birthday on May 16th. Your mama

21:38

is so proud of you every day and loves

21:41

you a lot.

21:42

Xander, keep asking questions. Mom

21:44

and Papa love you, and happy birthday on

21:46

May.