Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Day 18 Sound Poem and the Music of the Spheres

The sounds emitted by planets and moons in our solar system provide the prompt for Day 18.  Electromagnetic waves were picked up by various NASA probes and translated into sounds we can hear.  You can here them here.  This one really resonated with me given my interest in metaphysics and philosophy.  In my research for this poem, I learned that Pythagoras theorized that the Sun, the Moon, and the planets each produced sounds based on their orbital revolutions.  He spoke of the universe as an immense monochord.  Pythagoras and other Greeks, drawing from other ancient cosmologists, envisioned the seven heavens each singing one of the seven sacred vowels (alpha, epsilon, (h)eta, iota, omikron, upsilon, and omega... a, e, h, i, o, u, o), forming a perfect harmony in praise of the creator.  Hmmm... has science proven Pythagoras right, at least in terms of the planets producing tones?  Fun to think about, and plenty of fodder for a poem:





MUSICA UNIVERSALIS

And could it be that we are music
emanating from the stars,
harmonies formed from the
immense monochord, sacred
octaves in a cosmic chant, the
universal hum, the celestial
Om?

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