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As for the sonification, a star's convection produces waves that correspond to different sounds.

  The team adopted a similar strategy, running short simulations of waves generated by convection and recording the waves as they moved beyond the convection zone. First, they built a model to calculate the basic "song" of those convection waves—technically, the photometric variability from the gravity waves—and then they applied a filter to replicate the star's acoustical properties, akin to the damping filters used in a recording studio. Once this approach had been validated, Anders et al. ran convection simulations for stars with masses of three, 15, and 40 times our Sun. These showed what those waves should look like when viewed through a telescope.  “The smaller stars in our study are more like the violin, where they have some more high-pitched noises because they have a smaller wave cavity, just like a violin has a smaller wave cavity,” Anders told New Scientist. “And our larger stars have a bigger wave cavity, just like a cello has a bigger wave cavity, so they hav...
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Convection is also one proposed mechanism for the so-called "red noise"

  Convection is also one proposed mechanism for the so-called "red noise"  signals astronomers have observed in the photometric light curves of hot, massive stars—a mysterious pulsing that causes fluctuations in the stars' brightness . Specifically, it's been suggested that core convection, or turbulence from subsurface convection zones, could produce gravity waves that ripple outward to the surface. Those waves would compress and decompress the plasma, producing the brightness fluctuations in the star's light. Anders and his colleagues developed their simulations in part to test that hypothesis.  The challenge: while some waves make it to the surface, others are trapped below and bounce around. So they needed some means of distinguishing between the two kinds of waves. To do so, they turned to an acoustic analogy. "The character of music depends both on the sound waves produced by musicians and on the acoustics of the environment where is played," the a...
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