A NOTE FROM MICKEY ON THE UNIVERSE OF SOUND

We know parts of our body are vibrating ---pulsing, drumming---a million billion strokes a second. We know we are living on a modest planet that is belting along Time's Highway at nine hundred miles a minute, which might seem like a pretty good clip except we are caught in the slipstream of a Sun that's cruising at nine thousand miles a minute, and are citizens of a galaxy going even faster than that. Yet it feels like we're standing still, doesn't it?

Rhythm is the deep waters we swim in, mostly unaware.

One of the forgotten geniuses of Western science was a Dutch mathematican named Christian Huygens, who approximately 350 years ago discovered one of the fundamental laws of this universe. Huygens noticed that when he moved two clocks close to one another, their pendulums always synchronized and moved as one. Huygens called this phenomena entrainment. The urge of anything rhythmic (and everything is) to move together, to find a harmonious relationship, to share energy, is one of the glues (maybe the glue) that holds Everything together.

Part of the great power of rhythmic entrainment is that one is typically unconscious of the rhythms one most deeply entrains to, and unaware of all those that operate beyond the limited ability of our senses ---voraciously scanning the rhythmscape with a variety of media--- to detect. But these rhythms are with us all the time --- in here and out there.

Modern technology allows us to capture or imagine them ---electric, atomic, magnetic, galactic--- and gives us a way to translate these vibrations into sounds which we can hear. Our radio telescopes have recorded the song of the pulsar, our mathematicians have modeled the domain of the Big Bang. The Black Hole in the center of the galaxy Perseus is singing a steady note -57 octaves below middle C. I have gathered together an unruly sonic zoo of 23 of these magnificent, even dangerous space creatures, and I will be introducing them to you, one a night, as we tour the Universe of Sound, the universe will start to sing.

Check back after the shows to hear the sounds.

Mickey

Credit: Mickey Hart and Jay Stevens.

Images Courtesy NASA/JPL & NASA/JPL-Caltech & NASA/CXC/PSU

Sounds Courtesy of The SETI Institute and Additional Sound Design by Jonah Sharp

M.E.R.T. Jay Stevens, Howard Cohen, Fred Lieberman, Rose Solomon, Reya Hart, Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute, Karen Randall of the SETI Institute, Deborah Klein