It's my great pleasure to welcome back our Gresham Professor of Music, Professor Milton Lamicades.

Thank you very much.

Thank you so much.

Wherever you're joining me from in the universe. So tonight I'm talking about the connection between the music and the cosmos. And musicians have always been inspired by the world around them. It's distort Shakespeare. There is more music in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our imaginations. But further, there's this ancient idea that keeps recurring that music does not just inspire, is not just inspired by the cosmos, but is contained within it. Take the ancient Vedic tradition of Nada Brahma, which means the universe's sound. It's the idea that there's this eternal resonance should we choose to listen. And when we chant along with it, we're connecting with that power. And creation itself has this beautiful concept of the unstruck sound, a sound with no beginning. Similar thing happens in ancient Chinese philosophy, this wonderful parable of a master zither player who could play whatever he wanted to. Yet one day he chooses to abandon music altogether. Because he realizes that whatever he plays is neglecting some other sound. And it's only when he relinquishes his playing, when he listens to nature, that he achieves pure virtuosity. The metaphor is of carpentry. Whatever we fashion from wood is always going to be a reduction, the diminishment of the tree. And so, too, human music is a carving of this music of nature. And in ancient Greece, Pythagoras found this connection between number, the cosmos, and our inner souls. For example, if we take a string and we use rational divisions of it, it pleases our souls as well as our mathematical sensibilities. It's as if the cosmos, music, and us are all governed by the same laws, some kind of universal music or a music of the spheres. And this isn't just metaphysical. I could take any musical form and we could see that connection. Take the nomadic tribes of Tuva south of Russia, and they've developed this technique called throat singing, which uses, like Pythagoras, rational divisions, not of a string, but of their throat. So what you'll hear now is one human singing a drone, and then emerging from the cosmos are these notes from these divisions. And so tube and throat singers are able to basically harmonize with themselves, and they can only use the notes that emerge out of the cosmos, but in so doing, it's really beautiful. Now, if you haven't heard this before, it might be quite surprising, but you may recognize a Celtic edge because bagpipes do the same thing. The Japanese shakuhachi, a bamboo flute, can play notes, but its real artistry is on these gestures which imitate nature, winds, the squawk of birds, the rustle of leaves. He has these elaborate fingering diagrams to achieve this gorgeous sonic texture. Had to wait for that one. And we all have these moments in our lives, perhaps, where sitting by the sea or under the stars, where the sound of nature is enough is a music. Mine happens thanks to my late father, who was a nuclear physicist at CERN, and to whom I dedicate this lecture, where he showed me this muon detector, which clicked every time this interstellar traveler of a cosmic ray shed its subparticle load. And because of Einsteinian time dilation, it made it just enough so it would click in front of me to create this rhythm. And when that muon clicked, there's something clicked in my mind about the cosmos and music. Because sound is a form of communication. This is the longest continuous civilization on Earth. It's lasted for 65,000 years. The Australian Aboriginal and their civilization has pasted without written text and without recording. So how do you keep culture? Well, through sound and passing them on to others. And the best way to pass even on is through story, through poetry and music. So that their heritage is cradled by memory and the airwaves alone. Now it's a vast continent, our maps distort its size. Look how Europe comfortably fits in there. And so what they've built is a network what calls song lines, where they transmit their stories around. And not only do they transmit their stories, but they transmit their maps. Some say that they transmit pathways, navigational charts, in the melodies themselves. So this might identify a mountain range. So if you know the melody and we know what to look out for. It's this active force which actually influences the music that we make. Take the um Baka pigs of excuse me, the Baka people of the Congo region have developed this vocal technique known as appropriately as yelly. It's been created to cut through the dense forestry and call animals for a hunt, and now it's become this beautiful heterophonic tapestry. Or the cathedral, whose immense space creates reverberations which demand music that works when harmonies overlap. They have soft trans of it, but in return it transforms four voices to a divine choir. Or the salon, whose clear acoustic invites, obliges detail and character. And what's extraordinary now is that we don't actually have to go to those places to experience those sound environments. We have something called impulse responses or convolution reverb where we can collect that sound and use it. So at our disposal we have every space on earth. And some colleagues of mine traveled to Cairo just last year to collect not ancient artifacts or memories, but the sound inside the pyramid of the king and the queen's chamber. A forbidden space which we now have access to. So this allows me to take a replica of an ancient Egyptian lyre and put it in that space so together we can experience that forbidden resonance. But sound behaves wholly different to the ocean. Go on a kilometer, and one sound can last the length of an album and travel literally thousands of miles. And whales have learnt to dive down to that channel, or the so far channel, to communicate. We used it in the Second World War to rescue downed aircrew, but whales use it longer for creating song lines of their own. And there's something about water which has a musical quality. The way it changes, but I think it's because it wears its waves on its surface we can actually see the waves. It inspires music, but it's also used to make music. And again, around the world we have this recurring idea that the music can be made from water. Here's some women in the South Pacific who have developed this bonding ritual with girls and women. And then on literal other side of the world, we have the Bayaka children of the Congo region making this extraordinary rhythmic musical game. I've transcribed it with you. And if you listen to it, there's something watery about it, even if you don't know its influence. You might notice its lopsided rhythm. It has a two-three rhythm. And that's the same pattern we see in rowing. You pull for longer than you release, and actually in the shape of waves, which aren't sinusoidal but skewer to one side. So Rakmaninoff has intuited at this. Sometimes they change direction, it's beautiful. I'm just going to show you a little bit of the piece, and I've superimposed the actual notes, and you can see the waveforms as they build. Just snapping fingers and rubbing hands to create quite uncannily brain.

You can join in if you like. It's remarkably effective. I mean I can't I can't tell the difference. It's not pre-recorded on the door to I've got waiting on the stand though. It's a stunning jump, tonight yum.

So it walks that line between imitation of nature and evoking feeling, somewhere between sound and feel. And Beethoven does that in his storm or from Symphony number six. This is how he creates why here is heavy rain. He has groups of four in the bass, and then quite progressively, groups of five in the cellos. Now, if you heard the piece, you wouldn't hear it, but you'd feel it. It's this watery interference pattern that happens that even in MIDI is really effective. It's a masterful stroke of imitation and evocation. And here's his lightning. I love his handwritten scores. I'll never complain to students again. But look at the shape, how this is his uh lightning bolt on the right, and see how angrily he's lashed out on the page for it. So let's hear a little of the scene when lightning and thunder comes, and I've put superimposed his handwriting on top of it. But I also noticed that the gaps between the lightning and the thunder change. Now that happens when the storm is at a distance. And you'll see here that when there's a longer distance, the thunder is quieter, which is correct, and it gets progressively louder as it gets closer. Now, if you're a massive nerd, you can thereby calculate the distance of Beethoven's storm, given the number crotchets and the tempo. So at seven beats at 190 ppm, we have a storm distance or a safe 758 meters and dynamic of P. Wait. And there it is. Then it gets progressively closer, and you'll see the dynamics increase. That's 325 meters. However, when it's just one beat apart, we're at 108 meters away, which becomes in danger of the wrong type of conducting. And so climate inspires music, but now there's this art where it can actually dictate music. This is on the top left John Luther Adams piece where you can lift for climate data in one position. And superimposed is my four warnings for piano, where simply temperature, CO2 level, and sea level are given a voice, and you have a counterpoint of ice mass. Can argue politics, but not melody vibration. And there are waves all around us and underneath us. Turns out the earth is as unstable as the sea. And if you choose to listen, for example, with this Earth tunes app on the right, you can just navigate the globe and listen to live seismic data. Scoot it up a few octaves and you can have a lovely afternoon. On the left is a time lapse of seismic activity in Iceland. So the planet is resonating with these sounds, but it also forges other waves, like this beautiful mountain range in Brazil. Look at these lovely waveforms. Now the music you're listening to is by a Brazilian composer known as Villa Lobos. If you're a guitarist, you will know the name. He was an astonishing composer who contributed so much to the repertoire of his instruments, the guitar and the cello, wrote amazing symphonic works and um and heightened Brazilian art music, the single most significant creative figure in 20th century Brazilian art music. He was so good you might say he's on the money. By which I mean, this is my dad joke for the evening, he is on the money. In fact, these were discontinued sadly in 1987, but eBay everybody. And amongst his huge archive of writings and cigar boxes, we find some odd notations, these strange shapes in his um artifacts. What could they mean? Well let's take one of his pieces, Molodio de Montaña, which I think you can translate. And it's got a location beneath it. And I was interested to know what this was so I hunted it onto Google Earth. And this is the range of piety it's called from viewed from Belo Horizonte. Here's another beautiful picture of it. Isn't it lovely? And amongst his artifacts, we find this graph. What's he doing? Well, it turns out that piece is an exact carving of the top line of that mountain. Isn't that beautiful? So using his bark and jazz skills, he's able to harmonize it beautifully. Thank you. And there you see it, carved on graph paper, which became score, which was ultimately sourced from this mountain. But there are many mountains in Brazil, like this finger of God, it's called. Sounds painful. And you'll see in his arts these photographs and also this graph paper, how well do they match exactly? And Villa Lobos used to enjoy being by the mountains, transcribing the skylines to use his themes. Sometimes he did the shape of his friends, but he complained that they were the wrong shape. So he collected all these themes, most notably in his Sixth Symphony, usually named on the outline of the mountains of Brazil, where he collated lots of these mountains and lays them bare to be heard. Now still there's orchestration and beautiful um arrangement and harmonic skill, but they he presents them really factually, and I'm gonna show you a part of the piece, and I've done my best to hunt down the mountains and try and lay them next to each other. And thanks for a neuroscientist's spare time. We now have Earth Signs, earthsounds. Where you can hunt down these profiles, turn them into audio waves, histograms. You can even take the path of water and access these sounds yourself. Or perhaps take your favorite journey and turn it into a melody or a tone. There's a shortcut to you. But there are more skylines around us that we've built. Here's New York in the mid-20th century. And yes, among Villa Lobus' work, we see the New York skyline melody. He did something a little more this time. Not only did he do a top line tracing, but to create this beautiful chromatic melody. It's got a nice repeating motif here. But also the foregrounded voices, so we get polyphony. So with his harmonic skill, he's able to craft a piece that I find beautiful in its own right. And because I know the piece so well, I actually know the New York skyline of the nineteen thirties very well. It's not that useful. And the midline, which is repeated on the ground level. And of course, there are many architectural styles that we could source for such musical gain. Goethe said that music is like liquid architecture, buildings that move, and conversely, architecture is a sort of frozen music. My project Liquid Skylines builds tools so everybody can have melodies from their hometown or their favorite places on earth. But musicians return the favor. Here's a sculpture, uh a sculpture of four bars of a Bach fugue. It outlines the melody, but you can actually walk through it and enjoy the voices, touch them even. It's only four bars, just a fragment. Let me help you out. I think we need the whole city really. But music has its own architecture. Everything from Puerto Rican folk to squat Joplin to classical music has strong and weak beats. This is the population of notes in those positions, and you can see that they to have rhythmic grids, we need strength points that can support others. And pieces, compositions, are like architectural worlds that we walk through. Top left is Packelbell's canon, and it's like three travellers walking through that same landscape. Bottom right is one of Bach's riddle canons, top right is Schubert's harmonic moves on a doughnut, and on the bottom left is the 22 Shruti on a of Hindustani music on a circle. And composers like my predecessor Zenakis can even build strange architectural worlds to walk through. Laying out parameters and exploring them. I like this. It's as if both music and the physical universe obey similar laws. Reich's pendulum music and algorithms are understandable off the grid of music notation. And this device in the bottom left uses gravitational laws to create musical material. So our whole planet is chiming with resonances. The aurora dancing off the atmosphere can be scaled down to sound. And actually the Earth has its own harmonic series, but because it's not a string, it's a sphere, it has these what we call spherical harmonics, which sound like this. Which actually contains an even-tempered tritone. There's something natural there. Time for space. Sound doesn't travel well in space at all. So we have to use alternative means. We can load up music on the space probe and send it out. On behalf, hopefully it will be discovered by aliens. However, it only travels one late light day, which is nothing in the universe. Our radio bubble, our sonic history of broadcasts, is a hundred light years. But that too is peanuts when it's compared to our galaxy, which is peanuts again. Is that space completely silent? Well, it turns out that in our short time of space exploration, we have found three places other than Earth, where we've got some decent sound. One of them is our nearest neighbor, Venus. This is actual footage from the surface of Venus by a Russian space probe and actual sound. Quite astonishing, really. And that graph on the right shows that on Venus high frequencies are masked a lot more. So while on Earth we listen to holes like this, on Venus it would sound more like this. It's good for tech now. Where else is there sound? But on the moon of Saturn called Titan. Best view in the galaxy, I think. And again we have footage and sound from Titan. Now we assume that sound on Earth is the perfect ideal, but you can see from the graph that there's better acoustics on Titan than there is on Earth. So that's where we should be doing our recitals. LSO's Titan. Gets me over time. But where we have the most data, thanks to this little fellow, is the surface of Mars. These are images and sounds taken by the robot explorer Opportunity, who spent 14 years in service for our curiosity. Sadly, a dust storm wiped him out, so he was unable to recharge his solar batteries. And the last message he sent us was, My battery is low and it's getting dark. Why is that so sad? It's metal. Yes, sound on Mars is really interesting. Yes, the high frequencies are damped, but they're actually slowed down as well. So on Earth, Mars, the piece, sounds like this. But on Mars, the low frequencies are delayed. So you get the word really appropriately. So now we have Mars verb to add to the list of sounds. So when we do our concerts on Mars, either we have to put the violins really far back to balance, or we have to put everything through inverse mass verb. But because space is generally silent, we've had to represent its music. And composers have used various tactics. One of them is to imagine musical space being devoid of some culture or physical environment. So we use pure frequency and abstracted sound, like the early electronic music or B movies or Fermin here playing his namesake. What we can do is imagine a parallel world where the styles are mixed up. So imagine, let's just imagine all the instruments that don't belong together and put them together, like a synth bass. And then maybe 30 swing jazz groove. And then what else? Caribbean steel drum and a brass band, perhaps. And that's what John Williams did for Star Wars. In fact, he was asked to imagine that aliens had discovered our record collection or our radio bubble and didn't understand it completely and just made their own music from it. Music is also used in these media as a way of communicating intelligence. How do you communicate intelligence without a shared language? And one way is to communicate low entropy items, things that couldn't arise naturally. And that would be numbers like the harmonic series. But seconds, and spread motifs over minutes, not just a phrase. Ironically, Liligitty was channeling Renaissance music here. But there's a sort of shared ancient logic, perhaps. But the most resilient way of eliciting the sense of spatial distance is through harmonic distance. What I mean by that is that some notes feel closer together than others. And I don't mean on the piano, because when you go to a piano and you play the two closest notes, they sound distant musically. In fact, if you take a note and you uh bring out a it's a fifth relationship, they feel closer than any other. Thirds feel close also. So we can actually map out all our notes in these spaces, as I call a fifth, or if you're fancy of fifths and thirds. And earthly music tends to create chains of these fifths to make these sorts of shapes. But if we want to evoke space, we break those jades. And so we find space music does this in Holst's Mars. We have this tritone relationship getting as far away from the initial note as possible. Like a G minor and an E flat minor. They break the diatonic boundary. And so we could build melodies around that twisted space-type bone. Or the idea of wormholes in space where you have one chord and another and you sort of pass through them. Here we've got A minor and C sharp minor at the same time. This creates a sort of sense of portal-like motion. We can create a sense of uplift. C to E minor feels close. But if we go C to E major, there's a sort of float there. And this is what happens in space oddity. When he's on the ground, you go C to A, E minor. And then when after takeoff, which makes it feel a little lonelier. But maximal distance is taking two triads and putting them a whole tritone away. F even at the same time. Happy but grounded because of while all five notes are ascending the fifths and one is descending, and it kind of keeps a foot on the ground. It's happy but it's grounded. And what happens if we let go of the ground? Just going fifths all the way up. Suddenly, we're in microgravity. Now you see these diagrams from astronomers who like to use the metaphors of music, but what could it mean? Well, I'll tell you specifically. We find examples of the ideas of planets as fretboard markers. So imagine we have our solar system and we attach a string to the sun and one to Neptune. Don't ask me how. And there's distance, like on a Pythagorean instrument, would be at certain intervals. What would it produce? Something like this. Quite nice. Or we could imagine that how planets move creates music. And this on the top right is not some metaphysical diagram, but an exact represent representation of Kepler, who was the first to define elliptical orbits. Now elliptical orbits have different squashiness, eccentricities, they're called, and he represented them in terms of scales using Tycho Brahey's data. I love the moustache. I'm working on it. How close did he come? Well, it's astonishing, which is a testament to the data and the science of 1609. He is within a semitone of every single one, which is close as you can get to on the stave, because we don't have split notes. He's actually one semitone out, but we'll forgive him on the moon. I'll give you an example of how close he is. This is how he represents Saturn's motion. But as a sine wave, it would be. It's almost exact. You've got this one a little run, but I want to note that the moon moves in an imperfect, just intonated major third.

Perfect.

But the most resilient approach to translating planets into music is to think of them as oscillators. Imagine we're orbiting the sun every year. You don't have to imagine. We are. And if you speed it up, it will happen every month and then every day, then every hour, then every second, and we've entered the rhythmic domain. So what happens if we sm speed up the solar system? Well, Mercury would appear, some 37 octaves, as our fast and high rhythm. Then we'd have Venus slower and a little lower. And they make a pattern between them. Then us. And then my favorite Mars. And I haven't fudged the rhythms or the pitches. This is the solar scale. It doesn't match the piano exactly, it sounds a bit janky. But we do have two C sharps, two G sharps. The fact is it said D major seven over G sharp. Is that a fluke? Well we started to hunt out different planets. This is Trappist 1, which has um seven Earth-sized rocky planets. And it produces something we can generously call um harmonic ratios. It might take some acquired listening, but like anything, there's beauty in every computer. Three of Jupiter's moons are in a one, two, to four relationship, creating a cosmic countdown theme. Now maybe we shouldn't be so impressed because that's three of ninety-five moons. Any reason for Harmay to exist in the cosmos? Well, this is K2138. It's the first major discovery by citizens like you and me through Chris Lintotz, our professor of astronomy's Zooniverse project. And this is its cord. Why is it pretty? Well, they are in three two relationships, three over two. They are Pythagorean fifths. Pythagoras would be happy. So they're resonating like this. Why? Well, the leading hypothesis is that harmonic relationships meet often, so they clear debris, and so they stabilize the system. Music is used as a mechanism to create order from chaos. They've discovered a sixth planet, which isn't a fifth, which has annoyed everybody. And waveforms and data are found throughout. This is X-ray radiation from the massive black hole in the center of our galaxy. The patterns of that radiation turn into sound. It's the heaviest music you can imagine. And pulsars are stars that have collapsed to the size of London and they start spinning. Spinning at the rate of twice a second up to 700 times a second, which is perfect for rhythm and pitch. This is Andy Dayton's pulsar sonification where you can play the universe if you're at a loose end. But I'd like to end this lecture at the beginning. In 1964, two engineers from Bell Labs noticed by accident that there was this constant faint radiation everywhere. Wherever they checked, they checked their equipment, but there was this constant um persistent resonance. And it turns out it was radiation from the Big Bang. What happened early on in the early universe is the space wasn't transparent, it was opaque. It was like a plasma source. So sound existed at that time. At the time they really could hear you scream. And so we have these sound waves, and then they became transparent, and we get light emerging from it. But the sound, the sound is there on this map, frozen all the time. And what you're looking at is the earliest sound, or at least the remnants from it. It's quite extraordinary, isn't it? So in 2011 they've managed to sonify it and to so we can listen to that ancient sound. And isn't it extraordinary that we live in an age where we can tune into that original unstruck sound?

Thank you so much.