The music of this sphere
A fumbled harmony taking shape
A Book of Noises has two chapters on the idea of the music of the spheres, which holds that the heavenly bodies make harmonious sounds as they move through the sky. It also refers to modern re-imaginings, and to acts of imagination that attempt to apprehend the ensemble of the sounds of life on Earth. One such is Lewis Thomas’s 1971 essay The Music of This Sphere:
If we could listen to them all at once, fully orchestrated, in their immense ensemble, we might become aware of the counterpoint, the balance of tones and timbres and harmonics, the sonorities.
The acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton suggests that we try to bring to the mind’s ear the wave of song circling the Earth as daybreak sweeps from east to west and the dawn chorus of birds begins across each continent and island in turn.
A Book of Noises adds: “To this one might add two more kinds of wave. The first is the tiny, almost imperceptible sound arising from blue-green algae and other plankton as, at every sunrise, they begin to photosynthesise, and to produce little bubbles of oxygen that rise to the surface and burst in clicks and pops. The second are the many waves of sound as tides ebb and flow. Water pushes or sucks through rocky channels. Animals gather and depart.”
I am late to this, but Samantha Harvey’s Orbital (2023) ends with another version of this dream:
Out there, electromagnetic vibrations ripple through the vacuum as bodies in space give out light. If these vibrations are translated into sounds then the planets each have their own music, the sound of their light. The sound of their magnetic fields and ionospheres, their solar winds, the radio waves trapped between the planet and its atmosphere.
Neptune’s sound is liquid and rushing, a tide crashing onto a shore in a howling storm; Saturn's is that of the sonic boom of a jet, a sound that resonates up through your feet and between the bones; Saturn’s rings are different still, a gale siphoning through a derelict building but in slowed and warping tempo. Uranus a frantic zapping screech. Jupiter’s moon, lo, makes the metallic pulsing hum of a tuning fork.
And the earth, a complex orchestra of sounds, an out-of-tune band practice of saws and woodwind, a spacey full-throttle distortion of engines, a speed-of-light battle between galactic tribes, a ricochet of trills from a damp rainforest morning, the opening bars of electronic trance, and behind it all a ringing sound, a sound gathered in a hollow throat. A fumbled harmony taking shape.
The sound of very far-off voices coming together in a choral mass, an angelic sustained note that expands through the static. You think it’ll burst into song, the way the choral sound emerges full of intent, and this polished-bead planet sounds briefly so sweet. Its light is a choir. Its light is an ensemble of a trillion things which rally and unify for a few short moments before falling back into the rin-tin-tin and jumbled tumbling of static galactic woodwind rainforest trance of a wild and lilting world.