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Beginning with Pythagoras, ancient thinkers often wrote of a “Musica Universalis,” or music of the spheres—the idea that the proportions and movements of celestial bodies are a form of music, inaudible but harmonic, mathematical, and religious. The concept underlies Kepler’s writings on planetary bodies. Plato described music and astronomy as “twinned” studies of the senses: astronomy for the eyes, music for the ears.One form of future-proof music for science fiction might be a kind of Musica Universalis generated precisely by machines. This could represent the notion that we have the apparatus to sense—and the intelligence to recreate—discrete slices of the resonant spectrum. At this point, of course, the only thing separating music from pure mathematics is the organ used for intake: through ears rather than eyes, with the mind as the intended recipient.
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Image: HAL from 2001
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