Remixing the Music of the Spheres - Milton Mermikides and Chris Lintott

This is the fifth and final lecture from the Gresham Festival of Musical Ideas.
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/series/musical-ideas-2025

Professors Lintott and Mermikides present and discuss historical and contemporary musical representations of astronomical data including Pythagoras’s parallelism of tuning purity and celestial movement, Plato’s cosmic harmony in Timaeus, Kepler’s representations of orbital eccentricity as musical scales, Herschel’s blending of music and cosmology, and the tendency of stable planetary systems to ‘find’ harmonic ratios. The contemporary field of astro-sonification – using sound to represent, search and communicate to a diverse audience, astronomical patterns from black hole radiation to exoplanetary systems – is demonstrated with original examples.

This lecture was recorded by Milton Mermikides and Chris Lintott on 29th June 2025 at Barnard's Inn Hall, London.

Chris is Gresham Professor of Astronomy. He is also a Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford, and a Research Fellow at New College. Milton Mermikides  is Gresham Professor of Music.He is Associate Professor in Music at the University of Surrey, Professor of Guitar at the Royal College of Music and Deputy Director of the International Guitar Research Centre.

The transcript of the lecture is available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/remixing-music-spheres

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