[music playing]
[choral music playing]
A sound is but a wave in a medium, solid, liquid or gas.
And in the vacuum of space there is no sound.
Yet space is filled with waves, but without a medium to travel through, they lie beyond
the reach of our ears.
Until now.
Throughout our galaxy, and in galaxies far beyond our own, stars eject radiation spanning
the entire electromagnetic spectrum.
The music you're hearing comes from our sun.
A humble yellow dwarf, emitting energy from x-ray to radio like breath exhaling form its
ionized elements, From hydrogen to iron.
Robert Alexander composed the soundtrack for this stop upon our cosmic journey.
Satellite observations of that energized carbon, within and on the edge of the sun, is written
onto a musical scale, the sun's rotation its metronome.
[music playing]
Earth lies in the path of a constant current of energized solar particles like a stellar
breeze striking a extraterrestrial weather vane.
And that river of energy inflates our solar system.
What if we could dip our toe into this current?
This is what we might sense if that solar wind were translated into sound, at 20 Hz
and beyond.
[music playing]
This interstellar "whale song" you hear is sung from a field of plasma thousands of kilometers
beyond Earth's surface.
As part of that magnetic shield that insulates Earth from the solar wind, the Van Allen belts
sweep energized particles up and away from us.
If we had radio antennas for ears, the Van Allen chorus would be detectable in the audible
range of human hearing.
A source of invisible sound, only lacking a medium to make it whole.
[piano music playing]
With this piece, "Mandala", we can sing the carousel of the planets, including Pluto,
as harmonic musical notes, the period of their orbits a rhythm, and their pattern forming
the longest palindrome ever created.
Ten to the sixty-fourth notes of unrepeating cosmic melody.
No one knows why a single species of apes living on a blue planet swinging around a
yellow star created music.
Songs with which to communicate, to dream beyond a mere quest for survival.
With it we've devised ways to reach beyond our natural senses, we have created sound
from SPACE.
It's given us the power to ask "If the universe had a voice, what song would it sing?"