Acoustic Cosmology :: Heavenly Discourses 2011-11

AcousticCosmology

The utterance of a cosmological model?

Gavin Starks | [email protected] | http://www.BinaryDust.org

Cosmology Dealing with the origin, structure and space-time of the universe

UtteranceUtterances do not exist in written language, only their representations do

ConjectureIn the non-verbal languages of music and cosmology, mathematics is a representation of the utterance of the physics...

Mathematics can a representation of the utterance of a cosmological model, rendered in code, through sonification...

How can we create the basis of a soundscape, a palette, and a music, which provide frameworks for the utterance of a cosmological model?

Mathematical eloquenceMathematical eloquenceVisual eleganceVisual elegance

exploring extremesexploring extremes

1010-43-43 ... 10 ... 1099

“can nature truly be this absurd?” [Heisenberg]

On technocracy“I believe that in approaching our subject with the sensibilities of statisticians and dissectionists, we distance ourselves increasingly from the marvelous and spell-binding planet of imagination whose gravity drew us to our studies in the first place.

A scientific understanding of the beautifully synchronized and articulated motion.... does not impede a poetic appreciation of the same phenomenon.

Rather, the two enhance each other, a more lyrical eye lending the cold data a romance from which is has long been divorced.”[Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons]

From Pythagoras, to Kepler, to Einstein, there has been a persistent desire to find lyrical connections that join the disciplines, part of our search for romance, part our search for Truth.

“the sound world is not a space into which we can enter; it is a world we treat at a distance”Goehr [1999]

Acousmatic: sound one hears without seeingits originating cause (Pythagorean disciples listened to his lectures from behind a curtain, unable to see him)

“... the art of mental representationstriggered by sound”

Homont [1996]

“Poetry is the music of being human.” [Duffy] and, perhaps … Music is the poetry of the mind?

MonophonyPitch

Chant

PolyphonyHarmony

MadrigalsBaroque

FormHarmony

Refinement

Bach, Mozart,Handel

DissonanceMathematics

Primes

MessiaenGlass

LatticeMassGrain

Texture

Cage, Wishart

MappingTransformationDimensionalityCurvatureGravitationSymmetrySpin...?

… 1400s … 1500s .... 1600s … 1700s … 1800s … 1900s … 2000s …

SymphonicOperaticRomantic

Beethoven, Wagner,

Stravinsky

Music of the spheres

a music thought of not as an audible sound, but as a mathematical transform- a cry for a lyrical unknown?

Music of the n-dimensional hypercube

The mathematics of structure,as spoken

through grains of rendered sound, hewn from binary dust

Colliding galaxies NGC4038 and NGC4039Colliding galaxies NGC4038 and NGC4039

Take a Radio Spectral Cube and turn it into sound

The “data cube” is like an image,but instead of each pixel beinga single “colour" it is actually aradio spectrum. Each pixel/spectra has been transformed into a visible colourso you can see it, based on its redshift or blueshift.

Selecting a pixel with the mouse takes that spectrum and transforms the radio frequencies (light) into an audible range (sound) with an equivalent distribution.

You can listen to, and explore,the structure of the spiral arms.

ds2

Absorptance

[Jean-Pierre Luminet // Physics World]

AcousticCosmology

The utterance of a cosmological model?

Gavin Starks | [email protected] | http://www.BinaryDust.org | @agentGav