Music of Earth and Space

Music of Earth & Space

Professor Milton Mermikides

25th February 2026

Unstruck Sound

“Once there was a famous zither player named Zhao Wen who could play the zither like no other.
But one day Zhao Wen suddenly stopped playing the zither all together.
He finally realized that in playing one sound, it would be to the neglect of all other sounds.
It was only when he wasn’t playing that he could hear everything in complete harmony [...}
 only the Music of Nature is complete and undiminished ” 

From Zhuangzi’s 4th Century BC Taoist text, adapted by Tsai Chih Chung (tr. Brian Bruya)

In this third lecture of The Music of Nature series, we investigate how the physical universe – from the ground beneath our feet, the oceans, mountains, the climate, to the cosmos above our heads – has inspired and shaped our music. Of course, music is made possible – and in many ways governed – by universal laws: how sound is created, travels, is collected and translated into electrical activity in our brains, forging the musical experience. The natural world can also inspire pieces from Beethoven’s Pastoral, Debussy’s La Mer, to Holst’s The Planets, to name three of the countless examples across culture and time. However, we can find in several ancient cultures, a deeper connection between music and nature: the idea that our music is an imitation, a manifestation, or a revealing, of a pre-existing hidden music of the cosmos.

The Ancient Indian Vedic tradition of Nada Brahma encourages – though the chanting of Om – an attunement with the eternal cosmic vibration that breathed life through all: the beautifully named ‘Unstruck Sound”. The Chinese Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi penned a text in the 4th Century BC, a series of stories (from the beautiful to the baffling) inviting us to see our lives with greater insight and meaning. Within them they invite the reader to listen to the “piping of heaven”. One such tale speaks of a zither player Zhao Wen (see above) who at the height of the mastery of his instrument, ultimately decides to relinquish it, and not to play any sound.; listening instead to the “complete and undiminished” Music of Nature. The analogy is to that of wood carving: however beautiful an object we make, something is reduced from the tree – the original source. At a similar time in Ancient Greece, Pythagoras was through the monochord and other musical objects, was simultaneously measuring the behaviour of the cosmos, and revealing a Music of the Spheres: We happen to also use the term instrument for both scientific discovery, and musical expression.

Such grand philosophical ideas do appear in musical practice: the Japanese shakuhachi (which traces back at least to the 7th Century), is a bamboo flute whose stunning techniques include the emulation of wind and water, an example of a musical form where timbre – the sound quality – takes the primary role usually associated with pitch and rhythm. Tuvan throat singing presents such an animism of – and interconnectedness with – the natural world with the voice alone, using overtones to imitate babbling brooks and the wind through trees.

On a more personal level, a connection between nature and music is also rediscovered by individuals. You may have experienced moments in nature when the rustle of the wind, the ocean waves – or even near-silence – felt epiphenal, like a sublime music, nothing needed to be added. Such a little big moment for me, happened when I was a child at CERN (my father happened to be a nuclear physicist who spent his all-too-brief life unravelling the secrets of the subatomic world). The moment in question was observing (and hearing the click) of a muon detector in a public exhibit. It was designed to detect the subatomic muon particle, one of the remnants of a cosmic ray as it hit our atmosphere. This muon whose origins are ancient, lives for just 2 millionths of a second, but by the extraordinary fact of Einsteinian time dilation, its near light-speed buys it just enough time to reach the exhibit, for my apparent benefit. Without the detector, this ancient traveller would expire in silence, but when the detector clicked to make its arrival, something also clicked in me.

Waves upon Waves

Sound may be described simply as a changing pressure or particle motion over time: an oscillatory transfer of energy and information through a medium. Most often that medium is air, but wave-based energy transfer is fundamental to nature. Mechanical waves move through solids, fluids and the Earth itself; electromagnetic waves span radio to gamma rays; plasmas and even spacetime can ripple in wave-like form. These phenomena differ radically in medium and mechanism, yet the structured variations they carry are remarkably translatable. A sound wave can move a membrane, be converted into electrical voltage, stored as magnetic domains, pressed into wax or vinyl, encoded as numbers, or modulated onto radio frequencies. Each of these physical forms preserves a pattern. Through further transformation, that pattern can again move a speaker cone, disturb the air, vibrate the eardrum, and trigger neural activity. Music is not confined to one medium; it persists as structured variation capable of inhabiting many.

Although we are evolved to hear sound as waves in the air, it is a short-lived and limited phenomenon in that domain. A hand clap outdoors vanishes in well under a second and, even in very quiet conditions, carries only a few hundred metres. A far more efficient transmission medium exists in the ocean: the SOFAR (Sound Fixing and Ranging) channel. At several hundred metres depth, temperature and pressure combine to create a minimum in sound speed. Waves entering this layer are bent back toward it, becoming trapped in a natural acoustic waveguide. Low-frequency sounds can then travel not hundreds but thousands of kilometres, crossing entire ocean basins. Whales have learned to exploit such a natural structure for language – and arguably musical – transfer. The Fin whale produces powerful pulses around 20 Hz detectable across hundreds of kilometres; the deeper, sustained calls of the Blue whale can propagate vastly farther under favourable conditions. These signals are patterned, repeated, and regionally distinct – structured information projected into a planetary resonator. What fades within seconds in air can persist across oceans in water.

How do we humans circumvent the limits of air itself? In the absence of recording, writing, or electronic transmission, the Aboriginal Australians – the planet’s longest continuous existing civilisation – carried knowledge across a continent the size of Europe through a synthesis of feet, sound, and memory. These “songlines” formed an oral lattice spanning thousands of kilometres and generations. These songs and poems are an oral history of myths and a cultural archive. But there are also ecological maps and navigational systems, the stories and melodies themselves providing a geographical map for its tellers and listeners. In The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin recounts a tribal elder explaining that in some cases the “melodic contour of the song describes the nature of the land over which the song passes.” Music is used as a storage system in which to encode the landscape. A score that’s played back through The land itself became score and stave; walking became playback. I haven’t been able to locate a specific example of this, but Figure 1 traces an imaginary landscape from a Pitjantjatjara songline, illustrating how melody might contain landscape.

Figure 1: The transcribed melody of an Aboriginal songline (red), superimposed onto an imaginary landscape.[see downloadable transcript]

The Music of Sound

It is a natural view of music to believe it comes from us, and we place it in the world in appropriate sonic environments. However – as David Byrne suggests in How Music Works – it is a compelling perspective, that it is the acoustics of an environment that shapes the music of the locale. Take the yelli technique of the Baka tribe of the Congolese region: A distinct yodelling vocalisation performed by woman in the early dawn. The sound is designed to attract animals and communicate with others through the dense forestry, but has now evolved into a sophisticated muti-layered musical form. The huge resonances of cathedrals oblige harmonies and rhythms that can tolerate, and thrive upon blurred reverberations. Conversely the shorter reverb and clear acoustics of the salon, allow – even invite – the delicate ornamentations of classical chamber music. The heel-clicks, clapping palmas and biting rasgueado guitar strums of flamenco music are forged to cut through the warm outdoor environment and exploit the stone flooring. Stadium rock settles on a tempo to accompany the slapback from the stands, while the amplifiers and close walls and ceilings of a punk club, creates a sonic force that can transform an audience to a sea of flailing limbs.  

We now live in a world when re: reverberations of such sound spaces can – through ‘impulse response’ – be captured and reused by musicians, allowing anyone to place their music in an acoustic environment on Earth. From Zappa’s sideroom to the Concertgebouw concert hall, from a Congolese forest to the world’s longest reverb in the Inchindown oil storage tanks in Scotland. Last year a team of researchers from the Museum of Consciousness captured the reverberation of the Great Pyramid, allowing anyone to experience and engage with – and compose music for – the sonic character of this forbidden space.

Waves upon Waves

Water has an enduring relationship with music: the practice of water drumming, where communal rhythmic patterns are created in seas or streams, in a mixture of social bonding, play and function has emerged independently around the globe: From the islands of Vanuatu in the South Pacific to the Bayaka children in the Congo region.

Countless music is inspired by the ocean, seas and rivers. This is perhaps due to its mysterious blend of romance and danger, and its endless forms, movements and colours which feel so musical. I’d like to also suggest that – unlike air – water makes its waves visible. It carries sound, but also reveals on its surface wave formations. Sometimes musicians adopt these waves quite literally: Rachmaninoff’s 1909 Symphonic poem the Isle of the Dead – based on Böcklin’s painting of the same name – captures the rowing of oars, and the leaning of waves with a lopsided long-short (2 quavers to 3 quavers) rhythmic pulse. This – like building waves – builds in height, occasionally reverses in eddies and casts splashes of high notes at the peak. While the sense of the sea is present throughout, when zooming out these wave forms are seen to reveal a convincing large wave form (Figure 2): waves upon waves upon sound waves.

Figure 2: The opening 6 bars of Rachmaninoff's Isle of the Dead with its distinctive 2+3 lopsided rhythm. Below shows the note data of the piece revealing a higher level wave emerging.[see downloadable transcript]

The meeting of water and air, in rain and climate adds constant music inspiration, in onomatopoeic imitation and romantic inspiration. Movement 4 of Beethoven’s 6th Symphony represents a storm at the boundary of musical expression and literal sonic imitation. Low strings roll with (again) unsteady watery groups of 5, and the thundering rolling timpani get progressively closer until they overlap repeatedly with upward string lightning gestures (written with an appropriate flourish by Beethoven in his original manuscript). This passage – run of the mill in music history lessons – is in fact extraordinary in its ability to effortlessly capture the emotive response to a storm (whether environmental or psychological) and an imitation so plain that one could calculate the distance of the storm if we decide on related lightning blots and thunder claps (About 270 metres per crotchet incidentally).

In the age of climate science and easy translation from the data to sonic domains, many composers find it irresistible to allow the environment to speak to us through sound – as in the work of John Luther Adams, whose installations such as The Place Where You Go to Listen translate live environmental data from Alaska – seismic activity, geomagnetism, weather systems, daylight cycles – into an evolving sonic and luminous field, so that the music is not composed in advance but continuously shaped by the Earth itself.

Mountains high enough

Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887–1959) stands as the most internationally significant Brazilian composer of the twentieth century. So much so that he appeared on the 1980s 500 cruzados banknote. Largely self-taught, he fused European modernist techniques with Brazilian folk and Indigenous traditions, and a deep connection to J.S. Bach. His vast output from symphonies to major contributions to the classical guitar and the cello (his own instruments) repertoire, have left a lasting legacy on both Art music, the music of Brazil, and the potential of a (somewhat counter-intuitive) nationalistic eclecticism.  A striking device across several works is what he called millimetricization: the transformation of physical contour into precise pitch and rhythmic intervals. In Melodia da Montanha for solo piano, the mountain profile of Serra da Piedade (as seen from Bello Horizonte) is faithfully translated (with the use of tracing and graph paper) into a melody for harmonisation in his distinctive Bach-Brazilian-Modernist language. In Symphony No. 6 (“On the Outline of the Mountains of Brazil”), several mountain profiles (including the stunning Serra dos Órgãos) are translated, curated and superimposed into a lush homage to his homeland.[1]

Figure 3: A representation of Villa-Lobos’s millimetricization technique, translating mountains and city skylines into melodies. (Villa-Lobos Museum Archive) [see downloadable transcript]

His use of translation did not end there, he attempted musical portraits of friends (complaining sometimes that they were the wrong shape for music), and In the self-explanatory New York Skyline Melody, not just the skyline but additional foregrounded contours form the melodic voices of a genuinely expressive solo piano work.

Goethe called architecture “frozen music” and music “liquid architecture.” The metaphor is elegant (we can easily recognise the corresponding style of say Baroque and minimalism in both domains) but it understates the truth. Beyond a shared aesthetic, music behaves architecturally. It has load-bearing rhythmic pillars, ornamentation around structurally salient components and gravitational centres of tonality.

Iannis Xenakis (our 24th Gresham Professor of Music), a composer trained as both architect and mathematician, made this connection most strongly, creating complex architectural musical domains that are explored in performance and electronic realization. In works such as Metastaseis, glissandi fan-like hyperbolic paraboloids, sonic surfaces derived from structural calculations. The freely available software IanniX allows you to not only recreate Xenakis’s works, but build and travel through your own music–architectural worlds.

The Earth is thus pulsing with resonances, in the air, ground. Water, electromagnetic spectrum spinning through the atmosphere and splintering with aurora. Outer space shares the same universal laws, but also invites novel musical perspectives to which we now turn.

Distant Harmony

When composers – from orchestral to film – are called upon to conceive the music of space – and indeed the music of aliens – there are a handful of tried and tested methods. We can imbue the planets with a romantic grandeur, Holst’s depictions of the planets[2] assign characters as we would any mythological figure. These were of course borrowed from their mythological namesakes, which might not match the experience of being on these worlds: Venus is certainly not a romantic destination. We could also capture an other-wordliness in a more direct musical language. Holst’s use of the tritone interval in the planets (e.g. Mars – a D♭ in the key of G) has proved remarkably persistent. This interval is as far as two notes can be in the octave, and in the circle of 5ths, and so captures this sense of physical and harmonic distance. The concept is also extended to the use of not just two notes, but two triads or keys a tritone away. This technique, although found in early 20th Century composers such as Bartok, Richard Strauss and Stravinsky, is a staple of Sci-fi composition, an emblem of maximal distance. Take the keys of C major and F♯ major - with no accidentals and 6 sharps respectively – are as distant in terms of voice-leading as possible, positioned like distant harmonic galaxies. In the first few minutes of Star Wars–A New Hope (to name but one of countless examples), John Williams rocks between two triads (F major and B major) a tritone apart just as C3PO and R2–D2 are jettisonned into an escape pod. Similar uses of harmonic distance abound in the repertoire: Toto’s theme from Dune twists portal like through strangely connected triads, John Williams’ Death Star motif fuses the distant triads of C# minor over A minor. A similar Wagner-inspired move occurs in Darth Vader’s Imperial March Theme which bends the fabric of harmony with Gm to E♭minor; Elfman’s Men in Black and Poulodoris’s Starship Troopers scores spin and join pairs of tritone paired chords as intergalactic space is revealed.

Musical floatiness can also be evoked by relinquishing a sense of gravity. A Lydian scale (as used through Wall-E) is built from ascending perfect 5ths from, and lacks the grounding of more conventional – and Earthly – major and minor scales. The augmented triad is built from symmetrical intervals (a chain of major 3rds), and occupies a liminal harmonic space and is often used to evoke micro-gravitational space. Chromatic alterations can also create a sense of lift: When David Bowie sings “Ground Control to Major Tom” (on Space Oddity) the chords move between C and E minor. However, after take off with the line “this is Ground Control to Major Tom”, the chords move from C to E major. To achieve this, only one note is altered (a G to a G#) but this small step creates an unmistakable leap into a higher harmonic space.

Musical distance can also be summoned with the use of the ‘other’ – the bleeps, bloops and swoops of electronic machines, unfamiliar harmonic structures (the use of Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna), or by the cross-pollination of distant earthly styles. For example, a steel drum, a synth bass, and a traditional jazz harmonic and improvisational template are – on Earth – a universe apart in terms of culture and style and yet they fuse in the Star Wars Cantina Band. At once recognisable components, but an uncanny, otherworldly combination.

Music has also been presented as a way of communicating intelligence, consciousness and spirit in the absence of a shared language. This was the hope with the Voyager’s Golden Record, sent loaded with Earthly music for alien ‘ears’. However the idea of music as a universal language has become a repeated device in Sci-Fi plots: In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the extraterrestrials vectorise sound into a grid of pitch and time, teaching the listener the 5-note sequence as composed of relative intervals rather than absolute symbols[3]. 2001: A Space Odyssey’s use of Als Spracht Zarakustra is revealing in its use of ‘universal’ harmonic series, a shared language from throat singing to guitars to the cosmos. In Contact, the fact of intelligence is communicated through simple pulses, by grouping them in prime numbers; in Pluribus, DNA code is sent through space like 4 channels of a MIDI sequence, mistaken at first as music rather than a world-altering genetic sequence.

However, beyond musical representation, space has long invited the concept of a grander, universal music: a music somehow bigger – not just different – from our own. While this can be a rather abstract idea, let’s examine precisely what this may mean.

How to Play the Planets

Pythagoras’s concept of a Music of the Spheres speaks of a bonding through harmonic principles of mathematics, the physical universe and music. What could this possibly mean? Fludd’s engraving of the Pythagorean concept of Musica Universalis sits the celestial bodies as positions on a cosmic fingerboard, complete with tuning peg. The distances (and order) are wildly out from this (presumably metaphysical) representation, but this guitaristic thought experiment would still produce something. If we tied a guitar string between the Sun and Neptune (don’t ask how), and allowed the other planets to be fret markers, we could play a scale (again, don’t ask how). How would it actually sound? The intervals between the planetary frets would not be uniform (varying between 7 and 21 piano keys) and so the solar system scale would span over 6 octaves. It’s hard to find any compelling simple harmonic ratios that would please a Pythagorean purist, but it's a nice range and in the right hands and ears music is always possible.

Kepler took a more explicit and practical approach to cosmic music, describing celestial objects in terms of their angular velocity and thus pitch. Angular velocity is related to orbital eccentricity - how circular or elliptical the orbital path, and Kepler used musical scales as a shorthand for describing such shapes (see Figure 4 top middle). Although he is constrained by the musical stave (which approximates values), the results are remarkably close (generally within a semitone or ywo), a testament to the empirical and analytical scientific discipline of the time. Note the ‘single pitch scale’ of Venus (which with our current actually have a little quarter tone vibrato) compared to Mercury's extravagant major 10th (actually major 9th) eccentric orbit.

Another compelling approach is not to treat the cosmos as a fretboard, nor angular velocity oscillator, but as a sort of circular sequencer. Take the solar system – or any other planetary system you have at hand – and spin it more rapidly. As we increase the tempo, what took a year to orbit could take a day or even a second – the rhythmic rather astronomical time domain. What stays the same is the relative relationships between the planets (Mercury will always be around 4 times faster than Earth however fast we spin - think of 4 beats in a bar). This allows us to hear the harmony of ‘relative orbital periods’ turning solar systems into music boxes. What’s beguiling is that if we spin yet faster those relative rhythms start to be experienced as relative pitches - chords rather than rhythms. Mercury now appears about 2 octaves above Earth. The rest of the planets are organised into a lush Lydian chord (D#∆7/F# as it happens) with a wide interval between Mars and Jupiter for the asteroid belt. I have learned to love its sound but It is acquired listening: the pitches don't fall neatly to simple ratios, nor the equal temperament to which we are so accustomed. However you will notice pairs of near-ish G#s, Ds and C#s. Should we read anything into such (approximated) harmonic ratios?

A skeptical mind should ask why these intervals naturally occur (or how a Cosmic DJ would require and manipulate them) but a striking example of harmonic resonances is found in K2-138. This exoplanetary system was discovered in 2017 through citizen science via Zooniverse, founded by Gresham Professor of Astronomy Chris Lintott. Volunteers scanning data from NASA’s Kepler/K2 mission spotted something unusual: a tightly packed system of six sub-Neptunes orbiting their star in a near-perfect resonant chain. Each adjacent pair is locked close to a 3:2 mean-motion resonance. In orbital terms, that means for every three orbits of the inner planet, the next one out completes almost exactly two. And this continues outward, planet after planet. The result is a gravitationally coupled sequence analogous to a chain of fifths, a pattern echoed globally in musical scales, as well as rhythmic forms. A hypothesis of why this came to be  is that since this harmonic ratio aligns the planets often, it helps the system clear debris and stabilise itself. If this is the case, the concept is beautiful: harmony is used constructively: A musical mechanism to weave local order from a cosmic chaos.[4]

Figure 4: From left top:  An engraving from Fludd’s Ultriusque Cosmi (1617-1619)
depicting the Pythagorean concept of Musica Universalis, with celestial bodies on a cosmic fretboard.  Kepler’s Harmonice Mundi (The Harmony of the World, 1619); planets as nodes on an orbital sequencer (Matt Russo 2016); and the orbital periods of the planets as a musical scale (Mermikides 2024) [see downloadable transcript]

A Return to the Unstruck Sound

As our understanding of the universe – and ways to measure and translate data – expand so too does our ability to form bridges between the realms of music, Earth and space. Andy Deighton’s Ljómi Systems allow for all manner of data to be translated in real time to the sonic and musical domains; music can be derived from the scintillating colours of aurora to the mesmeric activity of pulsars. A leap in technological affordance, but a similar logic to the melodies of waves, mountains, lightning bolts and muons.

If music lives in sound, and sound can be described in waves (frequencies and amplitude over time) then with the right ear we can always listen to the meaningful (or indeed meaningless) patterns around us. And sometimes these come to find us. In 1964, at Bell Labs, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were calibrating a radio antenna when they found a faint microwave hiss coming from every direction. They ruled out pigeons, electronics, and local interference. What remained was relic radiation from when the universe cooled enough for light to travel freely, about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. That glow is the cosmic microwave background, its ripples frozen in time. Unlike the vacuum that occupies much of the universe, at its formation, space was so dense it allowed pressure waves to propagate, they could in fact hear you scream.[5] So there was a logic when In 2011 a team of physicists and technologists converted this temperature power spectrum into the audible spectrum, allowing us at our human scale to listen to those foundational vibrations - and linger a moment in this unstruck sound.

© Professor Milton Mermikides 2026

Footnotes

[1] There was a period when some would gleefully remind us that Holst wrote the wrong number of movements, as Pluto was yet to be discovered. Turns out he was ahead of his time, after all.

[2] Greg Cooper’s Earthsounds.XYZ and my liquidskylines.com project provide digital tools for the sonic and musical exploration of Earth’s topology and architecture, continuing the Aboriginal songline and Villa-Lobos legacies.  

[3] It recently occurred to me that the Close Encounters motif is in fact harmonics 9,10, 8, 4 and 6 of the Harmonic series, heightening its conceptual sense of universality.

[4] As is typical in life, there is now evidence for an additional planet in this system which breaks the chain. Why such a harmonic maverick came to be – and whether this challenges the hypothesis – remains to be seen. Stay (mis)tuned.

[5] Thanks to Prof Chris Lintott for this one.

Acknowledgments

Andy Deighton of Ljómi Systems Ltd. Web: ljomi-systems.com for his generosity in providing custom video material of pulsar and aurora sonification for this event; Greg Cooper for sharing Earthsounds.XYZ; Carl Hayden Smith of the Museum of Consciousness (https://www.themoc.org/) for the Pyramid’s ancient reverb.

References and Further Reading

Allen, B. (2008) Beethoven’s Natures. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Bellando, N. and Deschênes, B. (2020) ‘The Role of Tone-colour in Japanese Shakuhachi Music’, Ethnomusicology Review, 22(1), pp. 43–60. Available at: https://ethnomusicologyreview.ucla.edu/journal/volume/22/piece/1036

Byrne, D. (2012) How Music Works. Edinburgh: Canongate.

Chatwin, B. (1987) The Songlines. London: Jonathan Cape.

Discovery of Sound in the Sea (2025) ‘History of the SOFAR Channel’. Available at: https://dosits.org/science/movement/sofar-channel/history-of-the-sofar-channel/

Felicissimo, R.P. (2014) Estudo Interpretativo da Técnica Composicional Melodia das Montanhas, utilizada nas peças orquestrais: New York Sky-Line Melody e Sinfonia No. 6 de Heitor Villa-Lobos. PhD thesis. Universidade de São Paulo, Escola de Comunicações e Artes.

Godwin, J. (1993) The Harmony of the Spheres: Kepler to Kircher. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions.

Levin, T. (2006) Where Rivers and Mountains Sing: Sound, Music, and Nomadism in Tuva and Beyond. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

McBride, G. and Tlusty, T. (2019) Cross-cultural data shows musical scales evolved to maximise imperfect fifths. Available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.06171

McBride, G., Passmore, R. and Tlusty, T. (2023) Convergent evolution in a large cross-cultural database of musical scales, PLOS ONE, 18(1). Available at: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0284851

MacDonald, M.G. et al. (2022) ‘Confirming the 3:2 resonance chain of K2-138’, The Astronomical Journal, 163(2), article id. 162. Available at: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2022AJ....163..162M/abstract

McGee, R., van der Veen, J., Wright, M., Kuchera-Morin, J., Alper, B. and Lubin, P. (2011) ‘Sonifying the Cosmic Microwave Background’, Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD-2011), Budapest, Hungary. Available at: https://web.physics.ucsb.edu/~jatila/papers/SONIFYING%20THE%20COSMIC%20MICROWAVE%20BACKGROUND.pdf

Martineau, J. (1995) A Book of Coincidence: Geometry and Harmony in the Solar System. Powys: Wooden Books.

Mermikides, M. (2025) Hidden Music: The Composer’s Guide to Sonification. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mermikides, M. and Lintott, C. (2025) Remixing the Music of the Spheres. Gresham College, 20 June 2025. Available at: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/remixing-music-spheres

Murphy, S. (2006) ‘The Major Tritone Progression in Recent Hollywood Science Fiction Films ’, Music Theory Online, 12(2). Available at: https://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.06.12.2/mto.06.12.2.murphy.html

Rothenberg, D. and Ulvaeus, M. (eds) (2001) The Book of Music and Nature: An Anthology of Sounds, Words, Thoughts. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Slonimsky, N. (1945) Music of Latin America. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell