Interesting article here, called A Little Light Music. Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead is working on a project called “Rhythms of the Universe,” where he’s attempting to make music of the sounds of the cosmos. There are some sound samples in the video embedded below.

If there’s anyone who seems right to tackle a project like this it seems that Mickey’s the guy. I highly recommend Mickey’s book Drumming at the Edge of Magic: A Journey into the Spirit of Percussion, to anyone who’s never read it. In this book he talks about percussion and spirituality and using percussion as a spiritual bridge or stairway to ascend to timeless spirit realm; really a beautiful book but also a great study on the ethnomusicological aspects of percussion that inspire him.

I do think that trying to sonify the cosmos is kind of silly because the cosmos already is full of sound, even if there’s no sound in space, but nevertheless the concept is neat and the sounds created thus far are kind of spooky and vaguely reminsicent of Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrete, as well as John Bullitt’s Deep Earth Dome work.

Sometimes, oh hell, most times, we don’t know what we have until it’s lost. We make plans, and go about our daily business searching for some thing that’s out there, at some distant point, some distant place, some distant state of mind, or state of being. When really we don’t bother to look inside ourselves, look at our experience, look at the present moment and see what we have right now.

It’s been said, that we teach what we ourselves need learn most, and by putting these lines down I’m certainly giving myself a lesson. What do we have right now? What’s going on right now? What do we have to be grateful and thankful for? What do we have that our lives would be worse off for if we didn’t have it? There’s something like that for everyone, and when you figure out what that is, you can start being thankful and grateful now, not later… otherwise, when we get to that later point, we’ll realize what we had, but only because we’ll no longer have it. The universe can be a very cruel teacher sometimes.

Decisions are made for us a lot more than any of us would like to admit. Sure, we make choices, come to conclusions, take action and work at things that makes us believe that we’re running the show, but truly the path, the direction, the trajectory of our lives seems to be handed to us in a series of small choices from the cosmos, whether we’re even aware of it or not; a left turn when we would have gone right, a stop when we felt like starting, a risk when we wanted to play it safe.

Awareness isn’t the key here, though, I would say that the key is not submitting to the fact that the cosmos guides our life direction, but rather how we deal with the circumstances, how we deal with the trajectory, do we resist or move with the current of life to some end that we can neither conceive or imagine, to an outcome that is uniquely ours. I hope that I am able to stay with the current of life, somehow,  so far, that’s been so much more than anything I could have conceived or imagined.