Remixing the Music of the Spheres

Professors Lintott and Mermikides present and discuss historical and contemporary musical representations of astronomical data including Pythagoras’s parallelism of tuning purity and celestial movement, Plato’s cosmic harmony in Timaeus, Kepler’s representations of orbital eccentricity as musical scales, Herschel’s blending of music and cosmology, and the tendency of stable planetary systems to ‘find’ harmonic ratios. The contemporary field of astro-sonification – using sound to represent, search and communicate to a diverse audience, astronomical patterns from black hole radiation to exoplanetary systems – is demonstrated with original examples.