Space Music

While astronomers were tuning their high-fidelity radio antennas to outer space, electronic artists began turning electromagnetic ra­diation into music.33 Penzias and Wilson accidentally discovered the cosmic microwave background in 1965 just as high-fidelity equipment necessary for radio astronomy, as well as synthesizers and electronic instruments suitable for rock music, were being de­veloped. Both fields were poised for an unprecedented exploration of the cosmos.

Bell Laboratories was the perfect place for this seemingly unre­lated exploration of outer space. Having produced the first high – fidelity phonograph recording in 1925, Bell Labs advanced the technology used in radio astronomy and in generating electronic music. Karl Jansky, while investigating at Bell Labs the reasons for static in long-distance shortwave communications, in 1931 laid the foundations for radio astronomy by detecting naturally occur­ring radio sources at the center of the Milky Way. A quarter of a century later, Max Mathews, also at Bell Labs, began using a com­puter to synthesize sounds. Often credited as the father of com­puter music, Mathews wrote the code for the computer program Music 1, which in later iterations became a widely used program­ming language for computer-generated music.34 The lab’s simulta­neous interest in radio technologies and electronic music is hardly surprising, since from its founding by Alexander Graham Bell, the company that became Bell Labs was dedicated to developing elec­tronic media such as the phonograph, telephone, radio, and other communication technologies.

Music historian Pietro Scaruffi contends that it was not the elec­tric guitar, as one might expect, that would “revolutionize rock music down to the deepest fiber of its nature,” but the emergence of electronic synthesizers and computer programs designed for musi­cal composition. By 1966, Robert Moog had developed the syn­thesizer, “the first instrument that could play more than one ‘voice’ and even imitate the voices of all the other instruments.”35 Within four years, Moog was marketing the Minimoog, a portable ver­sion that allowed for live performance with the synthesizer. And in the decade that followed, high fidelity or hi-fi technology emerged as turntables, synthesizers, oscillators, and other electronic devices became more widely used precision instruments.

Even as Penzias and Wilson at Bell Laboratories were measuring the exact temperature of the cosmic microwave background, avant- garde electronic artists like the German group Tangerine Dream began exploring the new music genres made possible by electronic instruments, keyboards, and synthesizers. The group is credited with launching what was referred to as kosmische musik, cosmic or space music that later evolved into disco, ambient, techno, trance, and other new age genres.36 Their album Alpha Centauri (1971) is purportedly the first electronic rock space album in history. Scar – uffi writes, “Tangerine Dream’s music is the perfect soundtrack for the mythology of the space age. . . . They were contemporaries with the moon landing. The world was caught in a collective dream of the infinite. Tangerine Dream gave that dream a sound.”37 In 1972, they produced the album Zeit (Time) that included among other tracks “Birth of Liquid Plejades” and “Nebulous Dawn.” Other space-themed selections by the group were titled “Sunrise in the Third System,” “Astral Voyager,” and “Abyss.” Edgar Froese, one of the group’s founding musicians, wrote “NGC 891” for his solo album Aqua (1974) in reference to the crisp, nearly edge-on gal­axy in Andromeda oriented so that its dust lanes sharply highlight the galaxy’s outer spiral arms. English astronomer James Jeans in­cluded an image of NGC 891 in his popular astronomy books of the 1930s, and astronomers repeatedly cited this seemingly perfect spiral galaxy to illustrate what the Milky Way would look like from 30 million light-years away.38

In 1920, Leon Theremin invented an electronic instrument that produced electronic sound by moving one’s hands near two anten­nas that controlled pitch and volume. The theremin’s eerie tones often were used to generate sequences meant to evoke space-like themes, and the instrument served as a mainstay in both avant – garde and rock, particularly in the Beach Boys’ selection “Good Vibrations.” Such electronic instruments, along with synthesizers, modulators, and amplifiers, became invaluable to sound designers working in the film industry. Ben Burtt, for instance, widely known for the “synthesized sound worlds” of the Star Wars films, actually developed the now easily recognized laser-gun sounds by record­ing and manipulating the twang of a guy-wire from a radio tower after accidentally getting his backpack hooked on one.39

Just as the first generation of astronauts was walking in space and on the lunar surface, the related genre of “space rock” was likewise exploring the cosmos. The genre emerged as an art form during the late 1960s via the British psychedelic movement. The title track to David Bowie’s album Space Oddity (1969), which opened with the memorable phrase “Ground Control to Major Tom,” shaped much of space rock to come. Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), with its closing track “Eclipse,” is one of the best-selling rock albums in history. American songwriter Gary Wright’s “Dream Weaver” (1975) was composed using only keyboards, synthesizers, and drums and according to Wright was intended as a kind of fantastical train ride through the cosmos. Innovators like Brian Eno and Steve Roach contributed to spaced – themed ambient music in their evocative soundscapes. Eno’s Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks (1983), the soundtrack for Al Reinert’s space documentary For all Mankind, was intended to capture “the grandeur and strangeness” of the Apollo mis­sions. Eno characterizes the soundtrack as evoking the astronauts’ somewhat disorienting experience of “looking back to a little blue planet drifting alone in space, looking out into the endless dark­ness beyond, and finally stepping onto another planet.” He adds that the score was an attempt to extend “the vocabulary of human feeling just as those missions had expanded the boundaries of our universe.”40

But the intersection of music and cosmogony goes back to pre­history, when nomadic people would literally “sing the place” to recreate and remember a physical landscape in the form of song. Songlines in Australia provide the Aborigines with unerring navi­gation over harsh terrain that can extend for thousands of miles.41 Language may have started as song and the aboriginal Dreamtime sings the world into existence. Bringing the concept into the digital age, eclectic singer-songwriter Bjork released an album in 2011 titled Biophilia, where each track is a sensory experience rooted in sound but extending into an iPhone app.42 With songs ranging from “Cosmogony” to “Dark Matter,” Bjork explores inner and outer space with her ethereal, electronic, sonic environments.