I read with interest that some scientists have concluded that the Sun actually makes music. What they in fact mean is that the various magnetic fields of the sun vibrate at frequencies which, if they were vibrations in an acoustic medium and they were speeded up to be audible to humans, they would indeed sound like something. The sceptical among you will be thinking that a sound which is speeded up by an arbitrary amount can hardly be said to be the authentic music of anything: for example, if I had a note vibrating at 440Hz and speeded it up to 660Hz, I would be raising it in pitch from A to E. Do that too many times and on an inconsistent basis and that is tantamount to altering the melody of the whole song!
However, if one were to look at it not as the actual sounds in themselves but as a method of composition – by applying a consistent algorithm (algo-rhythm?) to the vibrations – one actually comes up with a piece of ambient process music of the kind that Karlheinz Stockhausen or Brian Eno would be interested in.
For those interested in hearing a WAV file of the sounds generated by the scientists from the Sun, Please click this link.
Sol Ascendans - The Website of Alex Sumner
The Music of the Sun
I read with interest that some scientists have concluded that the Sun actually makes music. What they in fact mean is that the various magnetic fields of the sun vibrate at frequencies which, if they were vibrations in an acoustic medium and they were speeded up to be audible to humans, they would indeed sound like something. The sceptical among you will be thinking that a sound which is speeded up by an arbitrary amount can hardly be said to be the authentic music of anything: for example, if I had a note vibrating at 440Hz and speeded it up to 660Hz, I would be raising it in pitch from A to E. Do that too many times and on an inconsistent basis and that is tantamount to altering the melody of the whole song!
However, if one were to look at it not as the actual sounds in themselves but as a method of composition – by applying a consistent algorithm (algo-rhythm?) to the vibrations – one actually comes up with a piece of ambient process music of the kind that Karlheinz Stockhausen or Brian Eno would be interested in.
For those interested in hearing a WAV file of the sounds generated by the scientists from the Sun, Please click this link.
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Tagged as Brian Eno, Music, Stockhausen, Sun