A Hymn to the Stars: What Happens When Science Puts the Universe into Music

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misbahulalam
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A Hymn to the Stars: What Happens When Science Puts the Universe into Music

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A little over six months ago, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) delivered its first photographs, dazzling the world as it revealed the cosmos in glorious technicolor. The first picture transmitted in July showed a galaxy cluster located in the Southern hemisphere sky, 5.12 billion light years from Earth. In the words of US president Joe Biden, it represented “the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe” taken by humanity so far. But NASA didn’t content itself with unveiling these first JWST images visually. Tapping into the long love story between music and astronomy, scientists mapped out the colors to different pitches of sound. Music and astronomy: an ancient love story Music and space might not seem like natural partners – after all, no air means no sound. But to our forebears, the links were obvious.

In Ancient Greece, thinkers such as Aristotle believed the Earth lay at the center of the universe. This didn’t make it an unchanging ideal, however: to the ancients, terrestrial phenomena were ever-changing, a Phone Number List
reflection of our planet’s imperfection. The sky, by contrast, was seen as immutable and eternal, and so worthy of emulation. A few of the stars moved with respect to others – so-called “planets” in the etymological sense (for planet means “wandering star”). The ancients knew of seven of them: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, plus the Sun and the Moon. That number would go on to inform the composition of the days of the week as well as of the musical scale. Europeans, get our weekly newsletter with analysis from European scholars Indeed, to the Ancient Greeks, each planet hung on a sphere, which, in turn, revolved around the Earth.

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Given that movement emitted sound here – such as when two objects rubbed against one another or when feet hit the ground – it made sense that the moving spheres in the cosmos should also produce sounds. Contrary to those heard on Earth, these were thought to be perfect, prompting the Ancients to use the stars as a template for terrestrial music. This is why in the Middle Ages astronomy and music were grouped together in the quadrivium, which also included arithmetic and geometry, and lay the foundations of the liberal arts education. Plotting the stars on the musical scale But how to weave together notes and planets? This is admittedly the trickiest part.
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