silverguide.site –

Jaw-dropping dark-siding exploration aside, it’s the mundane details of the Artemis II mission that connect us with the four astronauts slingshotting their way around the moon and back. The zero-gravity hair, the playing with the microphone when they’re on a call with the President, and the wake-up music that Nasa pipes into their module every orbital morning: a cookie-cutter selection of feelgood choons from Chappell Roan to CeeLo Green.

There are no reports, so far, of Artemis hearing anything like the strange whistling and “outer-space type things” that the dark-siders of the Apollo 10 mission in 1969 documented during the hour that they were out of communication with Earth. Those three men heard an unsettling and unforeseen sound around the other side of the moon that resisted explanation – and inspired conspiracy theories, since the transcript wasn’t made public until 1973. The sound is now known to have been the call-sign of our nearest alien neighbours, the Vum-Jums of planet A4863F.

Alas, I jest – that was not the case. The combination of a high whistling underscored by a quieter, lower whooshing was in fact the result of interference between two VHF radio transmitters on board the spacecraft. But imagine being Apollo 10’s astronauts, out of range of the Earth’s electromagnetic embrace, hearing those sounds at the very moment when you’re most vulnerable and most cosmically lonely. The sound disappeared when they could talk to Houston again – which only deepened the mystery.

These weren’t space sounds because there are no space sounds that are humanly audible out there in the cosmos. Without a planet-like atmosphere, there is nothing to make sound waves resonate, just gigantic and ever-stretching near emptiness. But space does teem with electromagnetic energy, a deadly radioactive maelstrom from which the Artemis’s four astronauts are separated by mere millimetres of aluminium and glass, that can be transformed into the frequencies of our hearing through a process of “sonification”: slowing down the hyperactive speeds of electromagnetic rays to the frequencies of soundwaves.

I find Nasa’s sonifications incredibly moving and miraculous: they allow us to feel physical, sonic contact with the orbits and energies of Jupiter, Saturn or the Sun. (You can also listen to the Huygens probe landing on Saturn’s moon, Titan, in 2005: there’s no sonification needed in this recording thanks to the density of Titan’s atmosphere, and hearing what Huygens was actually exposed to in its descent is the most stunning connection between our world and another.)

For me, no one has summed up the power of these space-sonifications better than Samantha Harvey in the last moments of her Booker prize-winning novel Orbital, about near-earth astronauts whirling around the globe on the International Space Station: “Neptune’s sound is liquid and rushing, a tide crashing onto a shore in a howling storm … Jupiter’s moon, Io, makes the metallic pulsing hum of a tuning fork.”

Harvey’s final words in Orbital are about Earth. “Its light is a choir. Its light is an ensemble of a trillion things which rally and unify for a few short moments before falling back into the rin-tin-tin and jumbled tumbling of static galactic woodwind rainforest trance of a wild and lilting world.”

Harvey’s musical metaphors aren’t just artistically apt, they’re scientifically on the money too. The ancient Greeks wrote of the “music of the spheres”, a system of cosmic ratios inspired by extrapolating the musical vibrations of a single string towards the circles of planets, sun and stars. Today, the exponentially complex vibrations of string theory are explained by the theoretical physicist Michio Kaku who suggests that “the mind of God [is] cosmic music resonating through 11-dimensional hyperspace”.

These theories reflect a deep physical connection: from dark matter to supernovae, every dimension in the universe is made from vibrating frequencies of energy, just like the sounds we experience as music. There may be no human-perceptible sounds in space – Ridley Scott’s Alien had it right: “In space, no one can hear you scream.” Yet everything up there, and down here on earth, is made from the music produced by those wild and teeming frequencies, from cosmic gravitational waves to tectonic plates and everything in between; their harmonies and frictions, concords and discords.

***

Talking of discords and music’s part in their resolution, Sir Karl Jenkins’ The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace, which is dedicated to the victims of the Kosovo war, is the first work by a living composer ever to top Classic FM’s Hall of Fame. This year’s list was revealed earlier this week, and Jenkins said of his 1999 piece’s enduring popularity: “We continue to make music in remembrance of those who have fallen and in the hope that humanity can find a way to heal.” That’s a sentiment that’s impossible to contradict.

But I confess that I find Britten’s War Requiem to be the most vivid and shattering anti-war choral work of our time. The piece was premiered in 1962 at the consecration of Coventry Cathedral, built after the original 14th-century structure was destroyed by second world war bombing. It mobilises a miraculous creative diversity to hold a mirror up to the face of war-mongering humanity, and in that moment of shattering recognition, it offers us the possibility of transformation and redemption. Britten would get my vote: alas the War Requiem is nowhere to be found in the Hall of Fame – in fact there’s nothing by Britten in the top 300. Next year, here’s hoping.

***

This week Tom has been listening to: the “keyboard diversity advocate”, as she calls herself on Instagram, Olga Pashchenko’s recordings of Mozart’s piano concertos, especially No 17. She dares to put Mozart’s performance practice into, well, practice, with a truly improvisational freedom in every moment of her playing on the fortepiano, with the musicians of Il Gardellino.