Audible Worlds: Harmony in the Ripples of Spacetime
Liv Xu
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“There is geometry in the humming of the strings. There is music in the spacing of the spheres.” proposed by Pythagoras revealed hidden parallels between spacetime and music and unfolded a new area of research in Cosmology.
Spacetime and music are interconnected. It does not surprise me if you are left thoroughly perplexed. In fact, the link between the two seemingly incompatible notions has been ingrained in human knowledge ever since the medieval times, through music’s inclusion in the quadrivium, as one of the four disciplines devoted to understanding truth. For the medievals, music was emphatically not a means of self-expression, but possessed the explanatory power for the composition of the world.
Although the medieval philosophical concept of musica universalis is considered incorrect by modern cosmologists, as ‘silent, imperceptible harmonies’, their attempt to transpose intangible universal laws into realities was not in vain. Despite the non-existence of the conceived harmony, they bring forth a true principle: music incarnates fundamental properties of the world. This hints at a deeper reality that lies beneath the fabric of spacetime in our perception today. In contrast to the physical cosmos which we experience and formulate, modern cosmologists have introduced acoustic cosmology which attempts to describe audible worlds. This adds a tint of scientific mechanism to medieval metaphysics. According to Gavin Starks, the auditory space is described as ‘the recreation of virtualised worlds which replicate the physical’ that aligns parallel to our perceptions.
In the presentation given to the Royal Astronomical Society, Starks introduced ‘music of the hypersphere’-a mathematical thought of an audible, navigable sonic space- and the concept of a ‘sonon’: the equivalent of a photon in a sonic universe as a fundamental building block. Regarding its relation to physical cosmology, Starks also formulated ‘wave-time’, which has three independent dimensions: the individual sonon wavelength, instrument time, and performance time. In addition, direct parallels are explored: the listener in the soniverse is analogous to the observer in quantum mechanics: a sonon is only rendered musical or not when it is heard. Wave-time can be bent by clusters of sonons, in the same way that gravity distorts space-time in the physical universe.
Curiously, cosmologists concluded, from the data obtained from the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), that there existed harmonious oscillations from the early universe, which was presented in The Cosmic Symphony. Modern cosmologists utilise a technique named spherical harmonics to analyse the patterns identified on the map of the CMB and synthesise them into a composition of sine waves, which is analogous to spectrum analysis in music when breaking a note up into its component frequencies.
Notably, this also coincides with the detections of gravitational waves, demonstrating its equivalent application in the motion of celestial bodies and displaying great promise. “We can hear the universe,” declared researchers at LIGO when announcing the first detection of a gravitational wave on 14 September 2015. By capturing a sonic translation of two black holes colliding more than a billion years ago, cosmologists had, along with confirming Albert Einstein’s prediction, finally achieved what ancient scholars had long dreamed of: translating the ‘music of the spheres’ into sound humans can hear.
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