Listening to Gravity Waves with Nsound!

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Gravity Wave Signal Processing

With all the excitement about LIGO and gravity waves, I’ve downloaded the raw GW150914 detection data for from here.  The file I downloaded was 32 seconds sampled at 4096 samples per second.

Next I reviewed some of the LIGO tutorial on signal processing here, and proceeded to write a Python script using Nsound to process the data.  Talk about finding a needle in a haystack!

Raw time-series data plot, the detection event occurs around 16.5 seconds in this plot:

gwav_raw_time

Where’s the signal?  It’s buried in noise!  Mostly low frequencies.  But with the help of a band pass filter from 80 to 280 Hz, we can get a hint of the signal:

gwav_filtered_time

Zooming in:

gwave_time

Plotting the spectrogram:

gwave_spec

Audio

And finally, we can listen to the universe!  The detection is a single blip as show above, however for your listening pleasure I’ve repeated the blip 4 times:

Link to the .wav here.

Python Code

Here is the Python code I used which uses my Nsound Python library:

 

 

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