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In February 2016, U.S.-based astronomers announced that they had detected gravitational waves, vibrations in the substance of space-time. When they made the detection public, they translated the signal into sound, a "chirp," a sound wave swooping up in frequency, indexing, scientists said, the collision of two black holes 1.3 billion years ago. Drawing on interviews with gravitational-wave scientists at MIT and interpreting popular representations of this cosmic audio, I ask after these scientists' acoustemology-that is, what the anthropologist of sound Steven Feld would call their "sonic way of knowing and being." Some scientists suggest that interpreting gravitational-wave sounds requires them to develop a "vocabulary," a trained judgment about how to listen to the impress of interstellar vibration on the medium of the detector. Gravitational-wave detection sounds, I argue, are thus articulations of theories with models and of models with instrumental captures of the cosmically nonhuman. Such articulations, based on mathematical and technological formalisms-Einstein's equations, interferometric observatories, and sound files-operate alongside less fully disciplined collections of acoustic, auditory, and even musical metaphors, which I call informalisms. Those informalisms then bounce back on the original articulations, leading to rhetorical reverb, in which articulations-amplified through analogies, similes, and metaphors-become difficult to fully isolate from the rhetorical reflections they generate. Filtering analysis through a number of accompanying sound files, this article contributes to the anthropology of listening, positing that scientific audition often operates by listening through technologies that have been tuned to render theories and their accompanying formalisms both materially explicit and interpretively resonant.

"In February 2016, U.S.-based astronomers announced that they had detected gravitational waves, vibrations in the substance of space-time. When they made the detection public, they translated the signal into sound, a "chirp," a sound wave swooping up in frequency, indexing, scientists said, the collision of two black holes 1.3 billion years ago. Drawing"

"A team of scientists announced on Thursday that they had heard and recorded the sound of two black holes colliding a billion light-years away, a fleeting chirp that fulfilled the last prediction of Einstein's general theory of relativity."

"The Robert L. Forward novel Dragon's Egg begins with an intrepid graduate student refusing to accept that a noisy satellite signal is just a malfunction. It must have some meaning, she thinks-and it does, turning out to herald the passing by of an inhabited neutron star (and making graduate school look rather easy). Even a malfunction, though, wouldn't really have been noise. We'd have to assume that some satellite engineer would be interested. In fact, it's hard to imagine any signal coming from space that would be of no interest to anyone. The noisiest signals are even sometimes the most important. Microwave and gravitational wave backgrounds, for example. Our modern definition of noise, as unwanted sound or signal, is a relatively recent one. The word used to mean strife, and nausea. Is the new meaning a useful ontology? Or does it encourage us to dismiss what we can't interpret? Welcome to "Noise.""