Mickey Hart's Music of the Universe Reveals the Sound of Supernova

The natural world and the vast reaches of space have long engaged our curiosity and have directly prompted artists of all types to bring forth creations that reflect their inspiration and sense of wonder.

While science and music may on a fast first pass seem to make for unlikely bedfellows, we have witnessed some truly remarkable musical statements that could not have been made without the artist having drawn insight from a consideration of the natural world.

Recent articles at Tonic have featured the equal-parts quirky and lovely Symphony of Science (a mash up of the musings of the late Carl Sagan) and DJ Spooky's Sinfonia Antarctica (an ambitious composition that incorporates recordings of the sound scape at the ice-capped bottom of the Earth).

Now, as reported by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, we have Rhythms of the Universe. In outer space, no one can hear you rock out. Sound waves do not travel in the vacuum of space, and even the cosmic cataclysm that is the supernova is completely silent to our ears. However, Rhythms of the Universe presents a musical offering that suggests what a supernova might sound like, once the different electromagnetic frequencies given off by an exploding star are translated into signals that we can hear.

Appropriate to the project, Rhythms of the Universe is made possible through the collaboration of two of the brightest stars in their respective fields: Nobel Prize-winning physicist George Smoot III, recently featured in the San Francisco Chronicle, and Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart, who has worked tirelessly to celebrate and preserve world music traditions through his Planet Drum and Global Drum projects as well as through his appointment to the Library of Congress American Folklife Center Board of Trustees.

Hart has been pursuing space as a raw material for his art recently, and several examples of his creations are available on the Grateful Dead website. Rhythms of the Universe recently premiered at an astrophysics convention Hart and Smoot attended in Mexico. Perhaps the following example is not a tune that's either catchy enough to whistle nor funky enough to have you dancing right there in your chair. But without doubt this fusion of musical creativity with cutting edge astrophysics successfully reaches for the stars in pushing the boundaries of creative expression and musical possibility.

Photo courtesy of NASA via Wikimedia Commons