IGNIS WINTER 2016-2017 | Page 17

Universalis continued to be studied as part of the Quadrivium, the mediaeval curriculum that included arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, although more weight was now given to the mathematical harmony of the ratios of movement than to the idea of audible sound. Musica Universalis finally lost ground as a philosophical movement by the end of the Renaissance. To find out more about the Music of the Spheres listen to this BBC podcast where Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the influence and history of its philosophy. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00c1fct Modern science can easily answer Pythagoras’s query as to why we can’t hear the vibrations of planetary movement – sound at a frequency humans can hear doesn’t travel in a virtual vacuum – but it is also proving that Pythagoras was right that the planets and the universe create sound. We cannot “hear” most of them directly, but by translating electromagnetic vibrations; gamma radiation, x-rays and other frequencies into audio signals we can listen to the sounds of the universe. In the YouTube video NASA Space Sounds by ritekid we hear electromagnetic vibration recordings and sampled sounds of the planets, moons and rings of planets in our Solar System taken by various of NASA’s Spacecrafts, and the man-made compositions Song of Earth and Voice of Earth created from the original Earth recordings. Embed video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmWeZHsQzs IGNIS 17