On August 21, 2017, Kiki Smith’s teenage sons giddily prepared to watch the partial solar eclipse in Rochester, N.Y. As Mrs. Smith listened to their chatter, she felt left out.
“I felt very alone,” she said. Mrs. Smith was diagnosed with the degenerative condition as a child and lost the last of her sight in 2011. The local buzz around the eclipse and national media attention unexpectedly struck a nerve.
The eclipse “was about experiencing a historic moment in the community, and I wasn’t a part of it,” he said.
Ms Smith, 52, who works for a community development organization in Rochester, is determined to do things differently for the April 8 total eclipse that passes through her city. Help organize a public gathering that prioritizes accessibility for people with vision loss. Her event will feature specially designed devices called LightSound that translate changing light intensity into musical tones, allowing blind and visually impaired people to listen as the sky darkens and then brightens again.
During this eclipse, Ms Smith said: “I will be with the community. And I’ll have all these wonderful resources at my fingertips to experience what I felt I missed last time.”
People across the United States with limited vision or blindness will experience the eclipse with the help of about 900 LightSound devices distributed by a team led by Harvard University astronomer Allyson Bieryla.
The instrument was developed in 2017 by Ms. Bieryla, director of Harvard’s Undergraduate Astronomy and Telescopes Laboratory, and Wanda DÃaz Merced, an astronomer who is blind and at the time at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
After learning about the needs of visually impaired astronomers, Ms. Bieryla equipped the lab she runs with a printer that creates three-dimensional, tactile representations on heat-sensitive paper of images taken by telescopes. Dr. DÃaz Merced has conducted research for more than a decade using sound processing, in which mathematical data is translated into sounds.
The two decided to create a device to sound that summer’s eclipse. Daniel Davis, the director of Harvard’s Science Demonstration Laboratory, produced a prototype.
On August 21, as the total eclipse passed her viewing point in Wyoming, Ms. Bieryla broadcast the audio from the device over the Internet.
Dr DÃaz Merced was then in Cape Town as a researcher at the Office of Astronomy for Development. During the eclipse, he shared the power with students at Athlone School for the Blind.
“When they heard it, they jumped and clapped,” he said. “It was the first time they got to hear such an event, so it was very important.”
About the size of a paperback novel, LightSound contains a light sensor that measures the brightness of the sky in lux, or illuminance units. Inside the case, code on a microcontroller board assigns specific sounds to numerical lux ranges. A synthesizer panel then produces a flute sound for bright light, a clarinet sound that fades as the light fades, and a slow, percussive click in the darkness of totality. Listeners use headphones or a speaker to hear the audio operation of the device.
In the run-up to the total solar eclipse that crossed Chile and Argentina on July 2, 2019, Ms. Bieryla’s team, funded by the International Astronomical Union, sent their devices or components to colleagues in both countries. At an event at Santiago’s planetarium, organizers hooked up a LightSound device to an amplification system so the more than 1,500 attendees—among them people who were blind—could hear it.
“It’s not just dedicated to the visually impaired,” said Paulina Troncoso, director of the undergraduate astronomy program at Universidad Central Región de Coquimbo, who led the LightSound portion of this event. “It’s also for everyone.”
The team offers LightSound for free and has posted the computer code and instructions for building the devices online. Ms. Bieryla’s team continues to work on the product to improve the user experience. For example, the 2017 prototype emitted a rather shrill tone. In 2018, Sóley Hyman, then a Harvard graduate student, redesigned the device to incorporate the synthesizer board and developed the code for the flute, clarinet and click sounds.
One of the students of Dr. Troncoso experimented with reprogramming the panel to use a simplified instrumental version of Daft Punk’s 1997 song “Around the World”. In the lower light, the synths fade out one by one, leaving only the sound of the drum machine.
Last year, Ms. Bieryla invited Elliot Richards, an engineer at Harvard, to redesign the device with a printed circuit board instead of a tangle of wires. The change makes making the devices much easier, and Ms. Bieryla and Ms. Hyman, who is now a graduate student at the University of Arizona, have taught volunteers to weld and assemble the materials in several labs.
Once people understand how LightSound makes the eclipse accessible, they are eager to help, Ms. Bieryla said.
“That’s been heartwarming to me — just the amount of work people have put into this project and the excitement around it,” he said.
On a balmy Saturday in March, a dozen volunteers sat hunched over tables in a classroom at the Austin Nature & Science Center in Texas, using soldering irons to attach components to circuit boards. The hot smell of hot metal wafted from the open door as the trill of a mockingbird in a nearby tree drifted in. As the volunteers tested their completed devices, the overlapping notes of the flute and clarinet sounded like the hum of an orchestra tuning up before a performance.
Mark Sullivan, who works as a welder, heard about the lab through his local astronomy club and decided to help. Mr. Sullivan had seen the total solar eclipse in August 2017 in Nashville.
People like him who can see “just take it for granted, being able to look at the sun for the eclipse,” he said, adding, “You want to make sure everyone has the opportunity.”
Ms. Bieryla’s team received more than 2,500 requests for LightSound devices. He sent as many as he could to event organizers like Ms. Smith in Rochester. in libraries, museums, universities and senior centers; and in schools for the blind.
In Austin, the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired will host an “eclipse extravaganza” on April 8 with tactile eclipse charts as well as LightSound devices. Yuki Hatch, a 12th grader at the school, said the LightSound device means she won’t have to rely on her limited vision to experience the total eclipse.
Ms. Hatch loves astronomy and in October watched the annular eclipse that crossed Texas. But he saw only a dot that dazzles and brightens.
LightSound “will actually give me more information than what I can see with my eyes,” he said.
Ms. Hatch plans to get a computer science degree and develop technology that NASA can use to send blind people into space.
When Ms. Smith was a freshman in college, she messed around in an astronomy class until her vision loss made it too difficult. The LightSound device marks an encouraging shift toward support and inclusion, he said.
Enabling those who can’t see an eclipse to hear it represents “an opportunity for kids to not give up on things like that,” he added.
