I got caught in the black hole of wikipedia yesterday, (you 'wiki' something silly, that you want a basic explanation of, then find an interesting link to something else, and another linked word on that page, etc...) and I ended up on the page explaining 'Musica Universalis'. Then there was another link (this is going somewhere, I promise) to a composer's page, by the name of Greg Fox. He has written a piece with a really cool concept, and here's what he's about:
"My approach in "Carmen of the Spheres" is to try to literally hear the planets as they orbit the sun. Obviously 365.25 days is a good deal slower than the average sound wave!! However there is a wonderful principle in acoustics, at the very least for humans, and that is that when you double the speed of the wave, the "flavour" of the pitch remains the same. The implications of this are obvious for things like "octaves" - an F# is an F# is an F#. However we can only hear certain frequencies - broadly speaking something like 50hz (ie. a pressure wave hitting the ear drum 50 times per second) up to (depending on age and exposure to loud noise!) around 5000hz, perhaps higher. Meaningful musical inflections are available for much of this range to differing extents, with chordal harmony being possible from approximately 300hz up to approximately 2000hz. Once the trick of doubling the frequency takes the sound-wave outside what we humans can hear, we have to take nature's word for it that an F# is still an F#, but there's no reason to suppose that it's not equally true. Therefore if you have the planitary orbital period enough times, you should find the "pitch" of a planet orbiting the sun (or rather that pitch raised several (in the region of 36 to 40) octaves!! (Obviously this metaphor has limits: doubtless planets do not orbit with ABSOLUTE reliability, though perhaps the 'errors' in orbital period become "small enough" once the wave has been sufficiently sped up!!)
Anyway so the method is to take the orbital period of the planets in seconds, divide and divide and divide by two until the frequencies can be heard. This gives us six octaves' worth of "planet notes" for each planet.
This approach could yield a variety of types of music and types of project. However for this specific piece I decided to further increase the "consilience" of the method by applying the same data to duration. A little higher up the scale of halvings, the periods are long enough (and short enough) to be useful as durations, so those are the durations I used."
-(http://homepages.tesco.net/gregskius/carmen.html)
"My approach in "Carmen of the Spheres" is to try to literally hear the planets as they orbit the sun. Obviously 365.25 days is a good deal slower than the average sound wave!! However there is a wonderful principle in acoustics, at the very least for humans, and that is that when you double the speed of the wave, the "flavour" of the pitch remains the same. The implications of this are obvious for things like "octaves" - an F# is an F# is an F#. However we can only hear certain frequencies - broadly speaking something like 50hz (ie. a pressure wave hitting the ear drum 50 times per second) up to (depending on age and exposure to loud noise!) around 5000hz, perhaps higher. Meaningful musical inflections are available for much of this range to differing extents, with chordal harmony being possible from approximately 300hz up to approximately 2000hz. Once the trick of doubling the frequency takes the sound-wave outside what we humans can hear, we have to take nature's word for it that an F# is still an F#, but there's no reason to suppose that it's not equally true. Therefore if you have the planitary orbital period enough times, you should find the "pitch" of a planet orbiting the sun (or rather that pitch raised several (in the region of 36 to 40) octaves!! (Obviously this metaphor has limits: doubtless planets do not orbit with ABSOLUTE reliability, though perhaps the 'errors' in orbital period become "small enough" once the wave has been sufficiently sped up!!)
Anyway so the method is to take the orbital period of the planets in seconds, divide and divide and divide by two until the frequencies can be heard. This gives us six octaves' worth of "planet notes" for each planet.
This approach could yield a variety of types of music and types of project. However for this specific piece I decided to further increase the "consilience" of the method by applying the same data to duration. A little higher up the scale of halvings, the periods are long enough (and short enough) to be useful as durations, so those are the durations I used."
-(http://homepages.tesco.net/gregskius/carmen.html)
I really like his logical and impartial approach to composing music. Plus, these pieces are free to download!! Thank you Greg Fox!
