You are looking at "Carmen of the Spheres" for nine sine waves totalling 64 minutes 12.246 seconds for stereo speakers.
This is (finally) the brand new work by Greg Fox, a first response to Edward O Wilson's "Consilience", Richard Dawkins' "Unweaving The Rainbow", Jared Diamond's "The Third Chimpanzee" and Steven Pinker's "How The Mind Works". All of these books deal with the relationship between art and science, between art and human nature, art and the world. The piece also owes a great deal of inspiration to Susan Blackmore's excellent "The Meme Machine", the final chapters of which are virtually my music bible.
This is my attempt at a naturalistic, astronomical approach to the "Harmony of the Spheres".
The overwhelming majority of historical examples take a broadly astrological or mythological view of the solar system. A long time ago my school-teacher Paul Caller recommended that someone (me!) write a new take on Holst's "The Planets", and this is it, so I dedicate the piece to Paul Caller.
My approach in "Carmen of the Spheres" is to try to literally hear the planets as they orbit the sun. Obviously 365.25 days is a good deal slower than the average sound wave!! However there is a wonderful principle in acoustics, at the very least for humans, and that is that when you double the speed of the wave, the "flavour" of the pitch remains the same. The implications of this are obvious for things like "octaves" - an F# is an F# is an F#. However we can only hear certain frequencies - broadly speaking something like 50hz (ie. a pressure wave hitting the ear drum 50 times per second) up to (depending on age and exposure to loud noise!) around 5000hz, perhaps higher. Meaningful musical inflections are available for much of this range to differing extents, with chordal harmony being possible from approximately 300hz up to approximately 2000hz. Once the trick of doubling the frequency takes the sound-wave outside what we humans can hear, we have to take nature's word for it that an F# is still an F#, but there's no reason to suppose that it's not equally true. Therefore if you have the planitary orbital period enough times, you should find the "pitch" of a planet orbiting the sun (or rather that pitch raised several (in the region of 36 to 40) octaves!! (Obviously this metaphor has limits: doubtless planets do not orbit with ABSOLUTE reliability, though perhaps the 'errors' in orbital period become "small enough" once the wave has been sufficiently sped up!!)
Anyway so the method is to take the orbital period of the planets in seconds, divide and divide and divide by two until the frequencies can be heard. This gives us six octaves' worth of "planet notes" for each planet.
This approach could yield a variety of types of music and types of project. However for this specific piece I decided to further increase the "consilience" of the method by applying the same data to duration. A little higher up the scale of halvings, the periods are long enough (and short enough) to be useful as durations, so those are the durations I used.
The full table of frequencies and durations is attached in various formats including plain text, comma-delimited and MS-Excel95 format.
To simply LISTEN to the piece, I would strongly recommend the 160kbps MP3, which is still QUITE a download, especially on dial-up. If you want to purchase a hard copy, message me and I'll do it more or less at cost.
"Music of the spheres" from an astronomical, rather than astrological, perspective. The orbital periods of the planets in the solar system are divided by powers of two to preserve their pitch-flavour and rendered audible.
I have included the raw materials so that you can compile your own version of this piece (you may be vehemently opposed to Pluto, or have a yearning for 2003 UB313 or Ceres!). The raw data can be used in a number of ways. There will steadily follow a stream of spin-off pieces so watch this space!
To hear the 160kbps MP3 version of the default published album version, click HERE.
Overall this is an attempt at a music of the spheres that's not airy-fairy but is rather empirically based. The files labelled DATA contain tables of durations and frequencies. The larger Excel-2000 workbook contains a lot of the workings out, preliminary thoughts, etc. including erroneous early approaches which succumbed to the fallacy of turning numbers into frequencies, ie. 400 becomes 400hz. This is entirely wrong, as 400hz is 1/400 seconds, not 400 seconds (obviously when you think about it!!), but on paper it's an easy trap to fall into. Another early fallacy was scaling the figures numerically. Frequencies behave logarithmically, with octaves sounding the same at 2:1 ratios. Therefore arbitrary division/multiplication destroys the flavour of the pitches and completely undermines any link between the original figures and the end-product. The best approach, in the end, was dividing ONLY by powers of 2 (ie. octave-shifting ONLY).
A brief note about style: is it a "minimalist" piece? I suppose it is. It's 9-part polyphony, too. I may not be a "phase minimalist" but the solar system is! Maybe I'm relinquishing too much artistic control in this project (which is why I'll be publishing the soundfont, and why I've published the data and the planet frequencies as WAV files) but I think as a first step, being influenced by the phase minimalism of the solar system was the right choice. Inevitably the first piece written with the new data will feel more "definitive" than perhaps it deserves, so it made sense for that "definitive" piece to be the one with the greatest consilience between pitch and rhythm and the one with the closest link to the planets. It MAY be that other people will have better ideas for increasing consilience - perhaps amplitude can be linked to planetary mass, or structure based on the spacing of the planets. If you make something along these lines, please let me know and I'll arrange for you to publish it via this page. Otherwise feel free to publish separately but please let me know, as I'd love to hear it. Regarding the "open source audio" status of this piece, I think it would be morally wrong to 'patent the stars', but if you want to derive proprietary pieces from it, that's entirely fine with me for the same reason.
*UPDATE 30th of July 2006* : uploaded data for some of the asteroids ("minor planets") in Excel95, Tab-delimited text and CSV format. I will make WAV files of their six octaves of audible pitch with durations in the same range as the ones I used for the main planets, a few at a time over the next few days. To compile custom versions of the piece along the SAME lines as the published CD, just paste the WAV data for the bodies you want to include in a repeating cycle until it fits the duration of the piece you want to compile, then mix the various bodies over the top of each other. I used a staged stereo pan according to position relative to the sun. (Conceptually we are listening from within the sun!!!) You obviously might take a totally different approach. The WAV files (or even just the raw data) are enough to get started. The related detail of 'MOONS' is an open question. They don't orbit the sun. Advice on possible approaches is welcome. For planets with many moons, one could simply plot their orbits and have the planet serve the same purpose as the sun does in the published CD. "The sound of the moons orbiting Saturn" - quite exotic!!! I think if I was going to plan a sexy meditation holiday on an alien world, Saturn would be a good candidate, if they could only sort the gravity and atmosphere out first! :-)
*UPDATE 3rd of August 2006* - in anticipation of the forthcoming Berkeley Groks broadcast regarding 2003 UB313, the Tenth Planet, I've added a couple of add-in WAV files. These are part of the "Open Source Audio" concept for the piece. As well as the WAV-file for 2003 UB313, which sounds very close indeed to concert "B natural", I've added two of the whopping great asteroids, Ceres and Vesta. In addition there's a brief data table in Excel format and in more compatible CSV format (should run on any spreadsheet program), containing about a dozen of the biggish asteroids and a couple of the big things that orbit near Earth. Anyone reading this, please listen to the Groks August 16th broadcast, which will feature an interview with Ken Croswell, who has written extensively on the subject of 2003 UB313.
*FURTHER UPDATE* 27th of September
Obviously Pluto has now been demoted, so "Carmen of the Spheres" (written before this decision) is a kind of 'dated' historical document already. I've uploaded a few further projects as part of the planetary aural modelling idea. These include "Reshaping the Stars" and the brand new "Easter SETI", which models systems Mu Arae and 55CNC, both of which have documented (exo)planets.
As a final update, I've added an Access 2000 / XP format database which makes it a LOT easier to do aural modelling of large periodic objects (such as planets). Just enter the name and period (in the unit of your choice; defaults to days) and click 'GO' and it generates a report giving you frequencies and durations in the range you specify, all of which are pure octave shifts of your period.
There is a support page for this "Octave Equivalence Tool" here (http://homepages.tesco.net/gregskius/oet.html) but the same distributed version is always kept updated here on the Internet Archive. The tool calculates the equivalent frequency of light as well as audible sound, so will be of interest to people with an interest in synaesthesia and related subjects.
UPDATE: November 2006: Added "Octave-Equivalence-Document" zipfile which contains a much clearer description of the method, complete with a proper mathematical formalisation: two versions of the formula are provided: one for input in seconds, one for input in days. The zipfile also contains an Excel 2000 spreadsheet encapsulation of the method.
UPDATE: December 2006: The long-promised soundfont for this piece is finally here. Zipfile contains a lo-fi demo mp3, an excel spreadsheet of the frequencies used, plus the soundfont in SfArk-compressed format. The file itself is an SF2 format soundfont as used by Creative soundcards and/or SynthFont. The soundfont contains two presets: one with octaves aligned for use with keyboards (some keys produce silence) and one with all notes consecutive for use with software MIDI-event generators (no gaps).
