Planethesizer: Approaching Exoplanet Sonification

The creation of simulations, sounds and images based on information related to an object of investigation is currently a real tool used in multiple areas to bring the non-specialized public closer to scientific achievements and discoveries. Under this context of multimodal representations and simulations developed for educational and informational purposes, this work intends to build a bridge between virtual musical instruments’ development and physical models, using the gravitation laws of the seven planets orbiting around the Trappist-1 star. The following is a case study of an interdisciplinary conversion algorithm design that relates musical software synthesis to exoplanets’ astronomical data measured from the observed flux variations in the light curves of their starand that tries to suggest a systematic and reproducible method, useful for any other planetary system or model-based virtual instrument design. As a result, the Virtual Interactive Synthesizer prototype Planethesizer is presented, whose default configurations display a multimodal Trappist-1, Kepler-444 and K2-72 planetary systems simulation.