Where we got our music

After about half an hour, the wind began to funnel down from the high southern pass, gaining force with each passing moment. A Venturi effect caused the gusts passing upstream through the narrow gorge to compress into a vigorous breeze that swept past our crouched bodies, the combined temperature and windchill now making us decidedly uncomfortable. Then it happened. Sounds that seemed to come from a giant pipe organ suddenly engulfed us. The effect wasn't a chord exactly, but rather a combination of tones, sighs, and midrange groans that played off each other, sometimes setting strange beats into resonance as they nearly matched one another in pitch. At the same time they created complex harmonic overtones, augmented by reverberations coming off the lake and the surrounding mountains. At those moments the tone clusters, becoming quite loud, grew strangely dissonant and overwhelmed every other sensation... 

[Our guide Angus Wilson, a Nez Perce Indian] took us a cluster of different length reeds that had been broken off by the force of wind and weather over the course of seasons. As the air flowed past the reeds, those with open holes at the top were excited into oscillation, which created a great sound -- a cross between a church organ and colossal pan flute... 

Seeing recognition in our faces, Angus then took a knife from the sheath at his belt and...selected and cut a length of reed from the patch, bored some holes and a notch into it and began to play...[Then] he turned to us and, in a measured voice, said: "Now you know where we got our music. And that's where you got yours, too."

from The Great Animal Orchestra by Bernie Krause

Thanks, Andrew Ray, for the reminder of this.

Photo by Edward S. Curtis 1911, wikipedia

Behemoth

So much human sacrifice and environmental devastation have gone to create a false heaven. 

— from a review of Behemoth by Zhao Liang

Once we sang in the sunshine and blithe, sweet air. But now I grieve upon the shattered Earth

—  a trailer for the film


 Image: Zhao Liang

The line between night and day

The Station goes around the world in an hour and a half, which means it flies through fifty minutes of day, followed by fifty minutes of night, endlessly repeating. This means that during a seven-hour spacewalk, you may see four sunrises and sunsets. I remember holding onto a handrail on the outside of the Station, which was flying silently up the Atlantic, from south to north, and as we moved toward Europe I could see the terminator—the line between night and day—rolling up over the horizon ahead of us. The white sun sank quickly behind us in a showy flurry of orange, pink, and red horizon bands, and then we were suddenly in twilight, floating into the dark half of the world. The terminator flicked over us, and, in the deeper darkness ahead and below us, I could see a huge lit-up city, glued to the curved Earth, sliding up over the rim of the world to meet me. I could see the structure of the city, with its glowing heart, its network of roads and its halo of suburban lights fading into the dark countryside. The city was Cairo, looking beautiful and radiant. Down there, millions of people were trying to make a living, find or keep a job, provide for themselves and their families, and worrying about the future. I could cover all of them with one outstretched hand. Cairo slid under and then behind me, and more cities rolled into view over the horizon, all tacked to the outside curve of the planet surface, and all seemingly moving toward us, rather than us toward them.

— Piers Sellers

Image via APOD

A roar on the other side of silence

You only have to imagine being in a desert to realise the variety of sounds a microphone on the surface of Mars could record – and how they can be interpreted. First of all, the wind, whistling across the planetary landscape – how fast is it travelling? How often does it vary in speed or direction? What does a dust devil sound like? Or a dust storm? What about the crack of thunder associated with a lightning bolt? Or the variation in pressure during an electric storm? Once the wind drops, the gentle sounds that break the silence can be heard: the settling of dust grains disturbed by the wind.

– from What does the solar system sound like? by Monica Grady.

In a review of Trevor Cox's delightful Sonic Wonderland, I invited meditation on: the sound from black holes (B flat 56 octaves below middle C); reverberations through loops in the Sun's outer atmosphere; and a wind shuffling rock grains through the Martian air.

Sound waves from the great storm that is the red spot on Jupiter may be the cause of heating in its upper atmosphere.

A creative interpretation of the old idea of  the 'music of the spheres.'  , which I have come across thanks to Stephon Alexander's The Jazz of Physics is an interpretation of Johannes Kepler's The Harmony of the World by Willie Ruff and John Rogers.


Image via APOD

"I must dream of a future that is different from the past"

I must dream of a future that is different from the past. A future that has in it everything my people need.
My ancestors and my fathers have dreamed of this future, and I have tried in my life, in my times, to bring it to reality. But I will not see it all, and I will not see the reality, only the dream.
Now when I am at Dhanaya, my most special place, I see the future running above the water, down the blue skyline and through the horizon, as if it were on a projector screen revealing to me a portrait of the future. At other times I see a beautiful painting, created by the hands of masters, now broken into a thousand pieces. Those pieces are split up and thrown about, and I am seeking always to put them back together, to refit the pieces, to re-create the picture as it should be and then to hang it again on the wall – a beautiful picture for all to see.
In these moments I tune myself up so high that sometimes I can’t even hear myself think. I wonder, then, who understands me, who could understand?

— Galarrwuy Yunupingu

Image: Planet Elto

Aliens and angels

We have only just begun to live with smart machines. While we worry today about killer robots, the challenges to come may be turn out to be much stranger. One day, we may find ourselves living alongside aliens and angels.

from Forget killer robots: This is the future of supersmart machines by Sumit Paul-Choudhury

Image adapted from Murray Shanahan

Two seconds of revelation

For generations most things people could see in the heavens never changed shape. The Moon and some comets were obvious exceptions.  Only recently has it been possible to see, with the aid of technology, the dynamism of the Sun's atmosphere, or movement in the clouds of Jupiter.

But images of change at larger scales — such as animations of galaxy evolution and distribution here and here — remain artefacts of reason, imagination and ingenuity rather than direct observation.

Our experience of stars, nebulae and supernovae is still mediated through static though often spectacular photographs.  Given how slowly the stars seem to change during a human lifetime this seems almost inevitable.

In this context, a clip showing fifteen years' expansion of the Tycho Brache Supernova remnant feels like something particularly remarkable, at least to me. At two seconds (blink and you'll miss it), it is the same length as the 1888 Roundhay Garden Scene, and no less momentous.