geocentric · 10 planets

The voice of the sky

The ten planets become ten voices, and their real positions are turned into sound. Each body is mapped to a pitch, a timbre and a pulse drawn from its longitude, speed and distance, so that the sky is heard rather than read. Five sound modes and mutable planets let you isolate a single voice.

by Dr. Alistair

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How to read it

Each planet is a voice, and three real numbers decide how it sounds. Its ecliptic longitude — where it stands in the zodiac — chooses the pitch, picked among harmonic intervals above the Sun's own note. Its distance from Earth sets the octave, so the near bodies sing high and the outer giants rumble low. Its daily speed sets the pulse, from the Moon's quick beat to Pluto's near-stillness.

The Sun gives the tonic: the sign it occupies fixes the key everything else is tuned to. When a planet turns retrograde its waveform changes, so you hear the reversal before you read it. And since the planets never return to the same configuration, the piece never repeats — what plays is two years of real ephemerides, one day at a time.

The five modes are five orchestrations of the same data: Cosmic keeps all twelve intervals, Ambient and Crystal narrow them to pentatonic scales, Dark brings the outer planets to the front, Chaos bends the voices with modulation driven by speed. Tap any planet to mute it, and listen to what its absence leaves behind.

About planets → Tellurion →