Music of the Spheres
There is geometry in the humming of the strings,
there is music in the spacing of the spheres.
Pythagoras
It was Pythagoras who first proposed that the
Sun, moon and planets all emit an unique hum
based on their orbital revolution. “Engrossed
in the thought of whether he could devise a
mechanical aid for the sense of hearing which
would prove both certain and ingenious... he
happened to walk past the forge of a blacksmith
and listened to the hammers pounding iron
and producing a variegated harmony of
reverberations between them, except for one
combination of sounds.” (Iamblichus, 4th century
AD). After examining the hammers, he realised
that the hammers that shared a relationship in
weight were harmonious with one another. From
this he became the first mathematician to realise
the relationship of musical pitch to vibration,
that different, simple numerical ratios produced
different harmonic frequencies. For example in
stringed instruments the pitch of a musical note
is in proportion to the length of the string that
produces it.
From this Pythagoras extrapolated that if objects
in motion vibrate and produce sound, then
planets, which are very large bodies in motion,
must also produce a sound and that as their
relative distances were concordant with musical
intervals, that the planets in orbit must produce
harmonic sounds – a harmony or music of the
spheres. Surely however, the sounds they make
would be loud enough for us to hear? Pythagoras
concluded that humans must be used to the
constant sound emitted and that without a true
silence to compare it with, then we couldn’t be sure
we hadn’t just tuned those planetary tones out.
In a world where the Earth was the centre of
the solar system, the intertwining of astronomy
and music was believed to hold the key to
knowing the divine and poetic order of the
universe. The metaphysical theory of Musica
16
IGNIS