Musica Universalis

ISSUE #168

Musica Universalis is a cosmological concept which posits that the movements of the planets are musical. You could map their kinetics and relational mechanics onto patterns of frequency and hear them sing. Their masses hum like hungry cells, these giant beasts of loyal routine—not audibly, per se, but picked up by the soul, the way you clock a wrinkle’s twitch when locking eyes with each other.

The connection between these celestial bodies and music on Earth is ancient. “Harmony of the spheres,” the Greeks once called it. We float daily through all kinds of ultrasonics just waiting for the right interpreter, like thoughts that await their actualizing words. So while space has no air waves (and therefore no sound), I would never dismiss the existence of a song simply for lacking the equipment to hear it.

Music was changed when we left the atmosphere—space music is now an entire genre, marked by the stretching of every chord, the clank of claustrophobic metal tubes, the whirring of thrusters that mirrors a blood rush. They are symphonies of uninhibited imagination, compositions free from the weight of memory—and until we can listen to the music of the spheres, these will serve as our celestial songs.