Neil Armstrong's Moon Landing Heartbeat Is the Bassline in This Song

Yesterday marked the 45th anniversary of man walking on the Moon—or really, two men in particular. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took their first lunar steps after Apollo 11 touched down on July 20, 1969, and the former's internal experience is the subject of Berlin-based musician Louise Gold’s recent space-themed composition.

Gold recorded a cover of John Lennon’s “Oh My Love,” based around Armstrong’s heartbeat as he made his moonwalk, and featuring other space samples (h/t to Leslie Katz at CNet for finding the song). I reached out to Gold to find out more about how she made the track.

“A while ago I was listening to my world receiver late at night and stumbled across a program about the Moon landing,” she told me over email. “Because I was looking for space sounds I recorded it with my sampler and went to bed.”

When she listened to it, she was drawn to a part about Armstrong’s heartbeat, which the NASA mission report confirms spiked at 160 beats per minute—around twice the usual speed—but was for the most part lower than expected. “It struck me then, that this strong and yet peaceful sound could be the perfect rhythm for a song,” said Gold.

She initially intended to put together an instrumental piece to honor the occasion, but decided that Lennon’s song resonated with how she imagined Armstrong must have felt at the time: “peaceful and exhilarated at the same time, a bit like being in love with someone and finding out that this person loves you back.”

The other space sounds in the track come from NASA recordings Gold discovered on a CD at the library. Recordings from Voyager turned data from the ship’s plasma wave instrument into sound, and Gold looped a sample from when the mission passed Venus and Jupiter, “since both had in between a lot of wheezing and whirring a circular repetitive sound, that sounded like an uneven ball, slowly rotating around an axis.”

The orbit she constructed matched with the backdrop of the heartbeat, and with guitar and vocals over the top, the song was complete. It’s a fittingly sentimental and spacey production to commemorate the more emotive side of the mission to the Moon.