The songs of spacetime
Astronomy has long been an image-based science: telescopes are essentially extensions of our eyes, and astronomy commonly has been communicated through beautiful images of universe and its contents. As we describe here, gravitational waves do not provide us with new images. A more fruitful analogy instead can made using sound. Rather than giving us more beautiful pictures, gravitational waves give us a sound track that, at least for some astronomical events, sings a song about the dynamics of something very exciting that happened in the universe.
The links below elaborate on this idea, explaining an overview why it is useful to think of gravitational waves as sound like, and then presenting some examples of gravitational wave signals that have been produced by our group at MIT.