ClassicalMusicNews.tv blogger John Grillo has just put out a very interesting post about the discovery a few years ago that a Bb 52 octaves lower than the piano was emanating from the Perseus cluster of galaxies. John writes:

Throughout history, music and astronomy have always gone hand in hand. Man has stood gazing at the heavens and has pondered the natural world as long as we were able to do so. In the days of Ancient Greece, Pythagoras and Plato philosophized often about the Music of the Spheres. This concept was that planets orbiting around the earth produced a wonderful sound. Every celestial body had a specific ratio of distance just like the musical scale. Thus what we are left with is the divine harmony of the heavens. Galileo was raised in a musical family. Countless paintings adorn the world’s most breathtaking cathedrals with the pictures of angles playing music. With the glorious sounds of trumpets and harps, the music was in the clouds. In 1619, Johannes Kepler published Harmonices Mundi. His findings in the work correlating planetary movements with harmonic motion.

Read the complete post here. John includes a video of a Pulsar from the Crab Nebula, noting with interest that these vast features of the universe not only emit subsonic pitches but also keep time, creating, in John’s words, “the pulse of the cosmos”.

Here’s a nice compilation of black hole simulations from NASA (with a little alt-rock in the background) to get your mind whirring about these grand structures and how they create the soundtrack to our universe.

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