ASTRUM

Throughout the history of mankind, humans have always been ever so fascinated by nature and the mysteries hidden within. In our attempt to decipher the clues and understand our place in the universe, we asked: “why are we here?”, “what is the purpose of our lives?”.

We looked up at the sky and wondered what was out there. The sky, it was the unreachable, the beyond, so we thought “maybe that is where our answers lie”? From the very beginning of human civilization, each culture in their own way, both existing and lost, have formulated their own unique, sometimes similar ideas and theories about the objects in the sky and our relationship to them. The notion of us being simply a confluence of accidents was unrealistic. “Things are too perfect” we say. For chemistry to transform into biology, everything has to be just right. Our world is situated in a zone not too cold and not too hot; our sun not too old nor too young; our world, lots of water with ample land mass for life to propagate; most of the Earth-ending sized asteroids are deviated away thanks to our giant neighbor Jupiter; and the magnetic field of Earth protects us from the sun’s deathly rays, allowing us to formulate ideas how all these came together.

So, there must be a creator(s)? This manifestation of life is several accidents happening on top of one another. This symphony of life is too harmonious for it to have formed on its own. Someone or something must have orchestrated everything. But where, then, are the creator(s)? Well, we know from the plethora of geological evidence on this subject that many cultures and religions in the past have unspoken-ly agreed that heavens should be up in the sky and hell below, while also at the same time also attributing the celestial bodies to certain deities along the way. Despite being thousands of kilometers apart, in their own attempts to make sense of it all, we see shared relationships between each culture and the sky; such as the Chinese Feng Shui, the Egyptian, Greek and Roman mythology, the Mayan gods, and several other polytheist cultures that associated belief system with the sky, or objects within it. The moon, said to be a god, a timekeeper, a personification of Rr romanticism, seems to embody various properties associated with the divine and the; virtuous. The sun, depicted in many cultures as having a face in the middle, usually plays the role of some type of solar deity, an omnipotent being, the head of all gods, that breathes life unto the Earth. These ideas, though mystical at first, would later slowly evolve through evidence, experiments, and studies into the field of science. And many prominent figures such as Darwin, Newton, Galilei, Copernicus, Clausius and Thompson, and many more, would rise to make some of the most impactful contributions ever done to the field of science.

Music and science most likely began at the same point, the very dawn of human civilization; the very moment we started to develop our unique form of complex communication, language. Music keeps a culture alive and science pushes it forward. It is not so surprising then, that the Greeks, music, and astronomy in particular were intrinsically interconnected. For the Greeks, human creativity was attributed to goddesses known as ‘the Muses’; passing on their 9 attributes to humankind. Amongst these 9 we find music and astronomy (to which mathematics were very much related). Seeing the scientific field such as the study of the stars being categorized into the same group as music might seem bizarre to us today, but for them, these foundations formed the keys to understanding the harmony of the universe:

“There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres.”
Pythagorus ( 569 - 450 BC) The Mystery of Matter

Musica Universalis is the idea that the proportions in the movements of celestial bodies such as the planets and the sun are music, not music in the aural sense, but conceptually and mathematically. Each of the hums emits by a body is thought to have an impact on the quality of life on Earth. Though the idea is quite far-fetched, we now know of something somewhat similar. Scientists, since the 17th century has slowly developed over time the idea of planets’ orbits being locked in an orbital resonance; namely, that when the orbits of planets or any object, be it belts of asteroids or clouds of dust, are locked in a stable ratio close to being pure integers such as 2:1, 3:2, 4:3, etc. , their orbits are locked in a way such that no external gravitational influence may alter their orbit. The ratio exists sonically in terms of overtones of a pitch that are all an equivalent constant k hertz, based on the fundamental pitch, apart. However, a linear increase in the ratio is not the only type of orbit. For example, the Laplace resonance describes an integer relationship of 4:2:1 between 3 orbiting bodies. This relationship exists in the orbits of Jupiter’s first three Galilean moons Io, Europa, and Ganymede. This relationship has no harmonic equivalence.

In the classical music world, abstract musical references to astronomical objects abound, from Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata to Debussy’s Claire de Lune, Dvorak’s O Silvery Moon to Holst’s Planets. With the exception of a few arias, most of those musical interpretations came in the form of instrumental music, which by its wordless nature, requires the listeners to find ways to shape their thinking into connecting aural textures to the imagination of those distant systems. As such, any type of programmatic music humbly reminds us of the ingenuity of people who must work around the limitation of instruments to craft the appropriate texture. We shall look at some of that music, how they achieved it, and how those musical expressions related to their understanding of the universe in their own respective time.

Out of the many examples, one of the most famous meetings of astronomy and /classical music fusions can be found in Holst’s. ‘The Planets’. This well-respected musical suite is often mentioned in conversations about music and space. But as is often the case with space inspired music, this piece is not focused on scientific accuracy. When Holst was writing the suite, he drew his inspiration from astrology rather than astronomy, this becomes clear to anyone looking closely at the titles of each movement. The title of each planet is followed by the name the Roman gods and goddesses associated with it. As such, Holst’s interpretations are derived from the literal or philosophical connotations conjured by the planet’s historical and cultural heritage, using a rather subjective personal artistic approach. Many composers in the past had the propensity to follow along this line, relying on intuitive expression rather than accurate translations.

The first movement from The Planet Suite: Mars, along with Jupiter, is without doubt the most well-known movement out of all seven. Its ominous opening insinuates the onset of war, befitting the title “The Bringer of War”. As we know now, Mars is a desolate planet; nothing exists there but red rocks. And the red rocks are not a result of blood bathed rocks, but rather of something more familiar, rust, iron oxide. Formed a long time ago when water and oxygen existed on Mars, the abundance of iron reacted to oxygen to create thin layers of iron-oxide which would later get spread around by the dust storm. Holst, understandably, had chosen to ignore this fact. as the public was well-aware of the reasons behind Mars’ redness. By the time Holst finished the suite in 1918, a huge amount of studies had already been conducted on the subject of Mars and the public was also all over the Martian news as well. In 1870, the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli mapped channels on Mars and published a paper, but the word channels in Italian was mistranslated into canals, which indeed took the public by storm. In 1907, for example, an article in the LA Times mentioned how scientists have declared that the dark spots on Mars – the channels, were canals constructed by Martians as a part of their irrigation system. And again in 1911, by an article in the New York Times, the headline goes:

“Martians Build Two Immense Canal in Two Years”
NYT – August 27, 1911

Those ill-informed news articles show us that Holst must have, in some way, been aware of the scientific facts, but like many classical music composers before and after him, chose to not follow the science but their heart.

The Moon is another fortunate celestial victim (in-a-good-way) of inaccurate representations. We have Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, Debussy’s Claire de Lune, Dvorak’s O Silvery Moon, and Haydn’s ‘The World on the Moon’, amongst many others. Those pieces are often more evocative of the atmosphere encountered at a dinner party by a silvery moonlight-casted lake than the barren pockmarked surface of the moon. There is no way anyone would actually compose such enchanting music when they look at the real face of the moon, full of holes, lifeless and gray. As great as these pieces are, in no way do they present anything new in terms of textures techniques or realistic musical interpretations. The sonic limitations imposed by the tonal system prevent them from evocating celestial dimensions with any accuracy.

The poetic and subjective musical interpretations of astronomy would later see itself paralleled by a new, fast-rising musical trend, one that attempts to be more in keeping with the scientific findings; deriving and transposing them as accurately as possible into musical parameters.

As the world becomes more connected, be it through advancement in the field of communication or transportation, information and inventions find themselves spreading with ease, replicating themselves from person to person like genes. This memeic behavior happens everywhere, including the field of music. New ideas constantly undulated through people, societies, and countries. As the bubble of a particular meme grows larger, more people become aware and more -related contributions are made. In the following sections, we shall look at how this idea of accurate musical interpretation found itself slowly metastasized to some parts of the music community.

A video of Chris Hadfield on board the international space station singing David Bowie’s Space Oddity was released on May 12th, 2013. The video became an internet sensation, the seminal space song performed from a space station itself was always going to grab some attention! Here, the world not only witnessed a weird stage setup that is space, but also a phenomenon, which allows the ideas in the modern world to propagate quickly: internet streaming.

Streaming is one of the truly fastest ways of transferring information, as the ideas are passed on almost instantaneously, if live, else it can be stored for later consumption. The advantage this has over cables are the accessibility, relevance, and cost. With only cables, people also had to pay for what they do not watch, and if they do not film the broadcast themselves, their options of watching the broadcasted video would be rather limited. Streaming, however good it is, would not have been possible, had it not for the advent of the first prototypes of their respective technologies.

On April 9, 1860, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville created the first sound recording. The device he used was called “phonautograph”, the earliest known device capable of preserving sound. The voice in the recording appears to be distorted. This might have been due to the translation into a modern audio file format or the inaccuracies of the recording device itself, or both. But however inaccurate this device was, this milestone set by Scott is tantamount in importance for the field of audio technology, to the one set by the Wright brothers for their contribution to the field of aviation.

The famous Galloping Horse is a series of photos taken by Eadweard Muybridge. He was commissioned to take several photos back to back to find out if horses feet touch the ground at any point in time while galloping. The picture was projected onto a screen in 1880, during Muybridge’s presentation for the first-ever exhibition of a motion picture in the world at the California School of Fine Arts.

Motion pictures industries have been one of the main driving forces pushing the boundaries of many types of audio-visual technologies. Sound design had, of course, already existed long before the time of motion pictures, but purely in the form of instrumental sound design. Due to their engaging and diverse content, their length, and their popularity, proved to be an excellent playground for sound engineers, musicians, and composers to test out their ideas, both analogue -- now with more than ever flexibility thanks recording device -- and digital -- which benefited greatly from the rather paralleled evolution of audio technology alongside motion pictures.

After WWII, in response to the demand of the returning public markets all over the world, existing military technology was gradually adapted for the general consumer, those new innovations in broadcast industries and consumer electronics created a new generation of audiophiles. The ever-decreasing price, weight and the ever-increasing quality of audio were more than enticing to people of all ages, especially the youngsters. And it was these young people who grew up to become innovators. Musicians, composers, and engineers exchanged their informed vision, helping push the Eboundaries of the art of music creation by providing many new possibilities for sonic and visual expression.

Before we dive in, it is important we explore what is outside the film world first, as music innovation did not come solely through working with films, outside of the film world, there exists another type of world that try to push the boundary of music as well, if not more than those working in the films. Many of the techniques used today such as granular synthesis, originated from a scientific paper about quantum mechanics. The paper was presented by the Hungarian-British physicist Dennis Gabor in 1947. His proposition was to combine the frequency-domain and time-domain information together to create a new way of representing sounds. The fundamental idea of his theory was that the ear has a threshold for recognizing sound properties, below this threshold all the sounds, regardless of their timbre or pitch, will be heard as clicks. He called this idea the “acoustic quanta”, a reference to the actual quantum, which is the science that deals with really small things. By applying Fourier analysis to each of these small chunks, we facilitate the development of musical models using the mathematical tools akin to those actually used in quantum physics.

The celebrated composer Iannis Xenakis provides further innovative examples of music derived from mathematical concepts. He was also the first composer to turn the granular model into a real-life application. The first acoustic piece he applied this technique to was called Analogique A-B for String Orchestra and Tape. Presently, we use mathematics and algorithms to help us achieve the effects of granular synth instantaneously; with a turn of a knob in our DAW of choice. Back then, Xenakis had to devise his own method using an analog tone generator and tape splicer. Comparatively, his method takes significantly longer to achieve what we can do in a second.

In his book Formalized Music, which he published in 1971, he laid out the principles for his mathematical-based composition method. A method which he had used to write his piece Pithoprakta. His model described the erratic movement of the electrons on atoms sonically. This type of mathematical representation has opened the doors for developing stochastic music models of quantum mechanics.

After World War 2, people, especially in Europe were tired, worn from all the violence of the war. After losing so many of their friends and families, people shunned away from lively, happy music and turned to something more objective: Atonal Music.

WW2 was of course not the only reason people turned to Atonal, part of that was the will to explore a new aural frontier through experimentation with new technologies. People spearheading this expedition were those such as Schonberg, Stockhausen, Xenakis, and Webern, among many others. As important as Schonberg’s contributions to this field, Stockhausen relates more to our topic, as he has done various experiments with electronic music and some of the topics of his compositions deal directly with the subject of astronomy.

Karlheinz Stockhausen was a German composer, from the planet Sirius, if he is to be believed. He is acknowledged as being one of the most influential, important, and controversial composers. His compositions and theories remain important and are being constantly studied today. His works span over various genres and subgenres. His electronic music subgenres are those such as acousmatic music, music concrete, etc. His approach is vastly different from all his contemporaries. Composers such as Anton Webern and Arnold Schoenberg had confined the principle of serialism to pitch whereas Stockhausen, beginning with his composition Kreuzspiel, in 1951, extended the principle instead only to pitches, but to other musical elements: instrumentation, pitch, register, intensity, melodic form, and time duration. The result is his music assuming a certain level of geometric organization.

During the time of 2001’s Space Odyssey debut in 1968, the tropes of the sci-fi film of that era were full of monsters and teenage problems, with the arrival of this film, its challenging narrative, intriguing audiovisual tactics, and crazy-bold sound design and music, it redefined and set out new purposes for sci-fi films. It had totally shifted the mindset of the audience, their expectation and awareness were changed forever, and with those changes in the public, the industry as a whole would have to adapt, and sound became more than just an augmentation for the motion picture, it became a part of it, part of the narrative.

This movie’s soundtrack has broken all the rules and tropes for Hollywood cinema. Its soundtrack was eerie, texture like, music was used as a tool to push the story forward while still maintaining its role as a background and not getting in the way of the main narrative on the screen.

The history of synthesizers spans back several decades. This technology was the key to the hidden world of sounds. The synthetic, attractively unnatural sound of the synth, though its origin is not related to movies in any way, found its way into the cinema and has ever since, been a crucial component in creating a convincing cinematic world.

Before synthesizers, there existed some types of musical instruments that require electricity, with the most famous being the theremin. The synthesizer as we know it originated in the 1960s when Robert Moog debuted his Moog synthesizer. And it was in the 1980s when the MIDI was introduced and the synth market exploded, the sound of synthesizers could be heard anywhere, including and especially, in sci-fi films. There were some movies that stuck to the old trend of orchestral music, such as Spielberg’s film, usually composed by John Williams, Back to the Future, Psycho, The Exorcist, the GodFather, etc.

Films that embraced this technology has opened door to the new sonic frontier, to give an example, the famous opening synth note from Yamaha CS-80 in Blade Runner that gave it such an iconic color to the movie; The famous Terminator theme played by Oberheim OB-Xa, SCI Prophet-10, Linndrum, and DMX and of the horror classic’s theme The Thing, amongst many others. What these films did was that they opened to new ideas and explored how they could utilize these new technologies to help them tell a story in a convincing and refreshing manner. And I believe, they did just that, they all were the pioneer movies in their own regard, the storytelling was already great, and they became even more memorable by their distinctive synth signature. As time goes by and as technology progresses, more and more directors become more aware of the potential these technologies have and how effective they can be when done right. Today, we have composers such as Hans Zimmer, Junkie XL, Thomas Newman, Harry Gregson-Williams, and many others in the industries who have embraced in one way or the other, the new opportunities available to them.

Now let’s step back and look at all the musical references to any scientific ideas, phenomena, objects, whatsoever in Film Music, both acoustic and electronic, and see how they are in comparison to the older generations such as the aforementioned Holst, Debussy, Beethoven, etc.

Composers of newer generations are undoubtedly better equipped when it comes to flexibility and versatility. By being able to study every single great composer of the past and with the help of new technologies, we have come up with many new ways of designing the sonic atmosphere for certain things, in our case, space. And it did really change a lot, if we take a look at Haydn The World on the Moon overture, it just sounds like any other classical music pieces from that era, whereas works by our contemporaries, such as the Cassini Goodbye series, commissioned by NASA to 3 electronic music composers Joseph Trapanese, Sarah Schachner and Ryan O’Neal as a tribute to the Cassini Spacecraft for its eventual descent into the abyss in Saturn atmosphere, we see completely different interpretations, be it in terms of harmony, instrumentation or structures and, most definitely more reverb on the modern side.

When we look at the modern interpretation of music about space, we see, sometimes an oversaturated use of effects such as reverb and delay, which of course are understandable as they give the feeling of space, the spacious feeling which is befitting to the connotation the word itself carries, but if we talk about an absolute depiction, something that makes us feel desolate like the actual space, we may be able to look at NASA’s recordings of the electromagnetic activity, radiation all the things happen in space which had since the released date of the series, inspired many composers to implement them as a material for their compositions. My task then would be to find out whether I can also implement certain principles mentioned here to portray parts of the universe through creating a piece of music or not, be it artistic or absolute.