LISTEN - Image of Research Submission 2025

The UIUC Image of Research competition invites students to submit an image and a short narrative about their research. Entries are judged by interdisciplinary panels on originality, visual impact, how well the image and text connect to the research, and clarity of the writing.

"LISTEN" is a photograph of a sculpture I made from a reshaped vinyl record and a laser “tonearm.” The form encodes the signal from the first detected gravitational-wave event, GW150914. Tapping a phone to the label plays the sound of the signal. "LISTEN" reflects the themes of gravitational-wave detection, signals emerging from noise, and making distant cosmic mergers perceptible through light and sound.

LISTEN

Can you listen with light?

LISTEN is my portrait of GW150914, the first gravitational wave humans observed. I reshaped a vinyl record until its surface rippled as if spacetime itself were stamped into PVC. A laser tonearm, echoing LIGO interferometers, skims the ridges, while its reflected beam casts a shadow that traces the wave’s shape. Tap the record’s label with a phone and the signal plays, making the phenomenon both seen and heard.

I build machine-learning tools to recover faint gravitational-wave signatures in LIGO’s noisy data and to infer the properties of their distant sources. In LISTEN, the shadow appears only when light and surface align precisely; in my research, signals emerge when models are tuned carefully to changing noise.

Once uncovered, the record tells a story that began 1.4 billion years ago, when two black holes collided, sending a brief spacetime disturbance on a long journey. GW150914 crossed the cosmos as continents drifted, life crawled from the seas, and humans learned to measure the imperceptible. When it moved through us one quiet morning in September 2015, we were not only observers but instrument, moving with the universe’s tides. And as the wave moves on, we remain.

Still listening.

Submitted December 2025. Judging will take place in April 2026 as part of the Image of Research review process.