Of course, what the planets are doing is not "music." Music requires a physical medium to carry it, and there's no air in space. Outside of an atmosphere, the planets are silent.
Voyager detected certain frequencies of electromagnetic radiation being emitted by the planets, and transmitted that data back to Earth. Then, some
person converted that data into sound. It's not the "music of the spheres," it's an arbitrary recording made to make this aspect of planetary science interesting.
We had a discussion about Frank Garlock on the fleabag forums a few years ago. His argument, as I understand it, is that the ratios of musical intervals match the ratios of planetary orbits, i.e. just as the ratio of the frequencies of an octave interval is exactly 2:1, each planet is twice the distance from the sun as the next closest, and hence the whole solar system does its thing in beautiful musical harmony. Sorry, it ain't even close to true - anyone can look these numbers up in a juvenile book on astronomy, or Wikipedia, and see that the ratio of the distances between two consecutive planets from the sun is more or less random. The idea of the "music of the spheres," or
musica universalis, comes from the philosophy of Pythagoras, who worshipped numbers and sought (in vain) to find such perfect ratios everywhere in nature. This idea persisted all the way to the Middle Ages, but only because they didn't have anything better to go on.
In fact, if someone devised a scale based on the
factual distances of the solar system, music based on it would actually sound more like this:
Grex Fox - Carmen of the Spheres part 1
Not exactly Handel, is it?
