Are gravitational waves really audible?

It seems obvious that LIGO would observe waves of gravity as images on a computer. Why would they also speak of those waves as being audible? (If you missed the audio, watch the video on Page 2 of this article.)

Q: Did scientists really hear a “chirp” sound from the gravitational waves?

Gravitational waves are not a form of sound. However, like sound waves, they cause vibrations in the material they pass through, and it turns out that the frequencies (that is, the number of vibrations each second) of many gravitational waves happen to be the same as the frequencies of sound waves audible to the human hear. For that reason, it is possible to create sound waves with the same frequencies as the gravitational waves, and in this case the sound happens to be somewhat like a bird’s chirp. Bottom line: Gravitational waves do not produce sound, but we can artificially create sounds with the same wave pattern and that can be useful when trying to interpret the gravitational wave signal.

For more information on the nature of gravitational waves, visit www.huffingtonpost.com.

Here’s another explanation of why LIGO hears gravitational waves as sound, from www.stuver.blogspot.com.

One convenient feature of LIGO is that it is most sensitive in the frequencies that the human ear could hear if gravitational waves made sound – but they don’t. I can’t stress this enough: gravitational waves do NOT make sounds since sound waves are fundamentally different from gravitational waves. But, if we take the data we gather from LIGO of a gravitational wave, we can put that signal through speakers and convert them into sound. In this way, LIGO is very much like a gravitational-wave radio…