The Smokelike Multitude Of Stars

We live among other species with elaborate vocal cultures, yet we seldom reach out to experience what might lie at an intersection of sonic cultures. Each animal species has its own preferences for timbre, pacing, and style, varieties brought into vivid contrast with our own through active, embodied dialogue. Scientists understand, through theory and experiment, that these diverse aesthetics are engines of genetic and cultural evolution. Rothenberg’s musical work provides a complement to science, investigating aesthetics from the inside, in ways impossible through the objective, but distant, insights of replicated scientific inquiry. After Angélica Negrón’s piece ended, I leaned on the wooden fence that defines the pathway and enjoyed a sense of calm after the rush of activity and people had passed. A hermit thrush, likely newly arrived from more northerly forests, snatched a tiny spider from among loops of speaker cable in the freshly fallen maple leaves. The bird flew to the crossbeam of the wooden fence next to me, then gave a loud, low tchup. Like the human voices that sounded from this same spot an hour ago, the thrush’s sound had a pleasing fatness and resonance. Deciduous forests have an acoustic warmth similar to that of concert halls. Sound waves bounce back from tree trunks and leaves, giving a lively sense of immediacy and a warming touch of reverberation. The music we heard this afternoon connects us, perhaps, to some of the aesthetic origins of more conventional performance spaces. But the link here between sound and times past is deeper than the human or primate lineage.

Come To My Aid

It is fitting that a botanical garden should host a celebration of sound. The first trees and shrubs, four hundred million years ago, caused insects to crawl upward, then to evolve wings. This led to Earth’s first animal songs. Later, flowering plants fueled the evolutionary explosion that wrapped Earth in the sounds of birds, most insects, and mammals. In this garden, land animal sound has come home. On a moonless night on an escarpment south of Santa Fe, I am astonished by the brightness of the gleam above. With no city light pollution, few clouds, and little dust to obscure vision, the night sky in New Mexico is a confusion of bright flecks against a silvery haze. I lift my binoculars. The haze resolves into yet more stars, with stellar clouds behind them in depths whose magnitude frightens me. The chill of the cold, dry air reinforces my unease. Although I’m breathing easily and rooted to the ground by gravity, I feel somehow unmoored. When the veil of a glowing daytime sky falls away, it reveals stars of such abundance and brilliance that our senses and imaginations are unearthed into a huge and humbling cosmos.

What Goes On

From the same mountains, starting in 2000, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey used a mirror two and a half meters in diameter to gather light from the night sky. This surface is about twenty thousand times larger than the retinas of my eyes. The telescope scanned back and forth across the sky for five years, recording with electronic sensors the coordinates of galaxies. The telescope found order within the smokelike multitude of stars. This regularity is the wave mark left by the first sounds of the universe, a remnant from the early cosmos scored into the patterns of the sky. On a clear sky, then, we can stare up and see the origins of sound in the universe. Where were these first sounds born? But sound exists only in space and time, its waves flowing through matter. No sound could announce the universe’s birth. Nor was sound born in planetary or geologic tremors, watery vibrations, or the stirrings of bacterial cells. But sound is older than atoms. No atom could exist in such heat. Instead, protons and electrons roiled in a hot lava, a plasma.

Sailing To The Moon

The plasma was a mire so dense that particles of light, photons, were trapped. Inside this furnace, sound was born. Irregularities in the plasma sent out pulses. Each pulse was a sound wave, a traveling front of high and low pressure, just like the waves of compression in air that we create when we snap our fingers. As the universe expanded, the crowding eased, causing the temperature to drop from billions to mere millions of degrees. At about 380,000 years after the universe’s origin, the cosmos cooled enough for the plasma to transform into material familiar to us now. As the traffic jam of protons eased, light was no longer trapped and fled. As atoms formed, they were marked by the waves that flowed through the plasma. Each wave crest, a place where the plasma was compressed, became an aggregation of atoms, separated by wave troughs where atoms were sparse. Gravity’s convivial imperative then drew clusters of atoms together, building the former crests of waves into ever denser crowds. From these early clumps, stars and galaxies grew. By our earthly clocks, this was an unhurried ingathering. One hundred and eighty million years passed before the first stars blazed. It took another billion years for galaxies to flock the skies. Now, 13.5 billion years later, a telescope on a piney ridge in New Mexico can measure distances between galaxies and find the regular peaks of the ancient sound waves. The wave marks are also discernible in the light that escaped the plasma. The glow is not uniform but is rippled with slight peaks and troughs. These patterns, like the spacing of galaxies, were imprinted on the radiation in the moment of its origin in the cooling plasma. These ancient sounds exist on scales that feel preternatural. Waves larger than galaxies? Ancient microwave energies passing through us undetected? Our earthbound senses have no bodily understanding of such beyondness. Our imaginations, though, feed on the gleanings of science, casting our minds into places and times previously undreamed. The brains that ponder the first sound waves are themselves made from these waves because our own planet and star are, like all planets and stars, descendants of the primordial plasma. From inside ancient sound, we listen.