I’ve interviewed three people so far in my quest for Plutonian knowledge.

The first was Aaron Taylor Kuffner, creator of the Gamelatron, an amazing robotic set of Gamelan percussion instruments (bells, gongs, etc.). I recently attended Burning Man where, in the Burning Man Temple, a Gamelatron was set up. There were instruments all over, up in the rafters, on the walls, all around the people inside. For most of the time, a gong wold sound every now and again, or a bell would chime, but every so often a rhythm would start, and a song would unfold. It had peaks and troughs and dynamics, and was truly inspiring to hear. It definitely influenced me in my direction with this proposal: I want to create an immersive sound composition such as that. So I decided to contact him. He was in Hong Kong but happily replied to my questions via email. We talked mainly about how he composes for such a format. For the Burning Man installation he had an 8-hour composition, that just continued looping. He composed it all himself, it was non-generative. His style of composition seems to be to improvise with the Gamelatron via a midi controller, and record those MIDI values to trigger the instruments later. He also explained how, using varying sizes of capacitors, he could get solenoids to move hammers at various velocities, creating strikes of varying volumes, pretty neat!

The second was astrologer Jonathan Robarts. He went into detail about the duality of destruction and regeneration which is at the heart of Pluto astrologically. The destruction is something that has to happen in order for regeneration to occur. He added “Psychologically, it is about the transformation of what is hidden, disassociated and pertaining to one’s shadow into awareness and new life.” I asked him about how Pluto is interpreted in other traditions of astrology. There are two main branches of astrology, Western and Vedic, according to Robarts. Both now accept Pluto, but traditional Vedic astrologers still do not, because the ancients had no idea that Pluto existed (it was discovered in 1930). Pluto was demoted to dwarf planet in 2006 and now is seen as one of tens of thousands of objects in the Kuiper belt. However, it still is considered a strong influential astrological body. I asked Jonathan why this was, and why don’t other, even larger bodies, become accepted in astrology and he said “good question!”

The third interview was with a post-doc astro-physicist turned climate science researcher at Cal-Tech named Peter Kalmus. I interviewed him by email as well, and he was not very elaborate with answers, at one point saying he was too busy to really answer my questions and that I could learn just as much by reading Wikipedia. I asked him about gravity waves, gravitational waves, what are they?? He had studied both, one as an astro-physicist and the other as a climate scientist. Gravitational waves are little ripples in space-time that no one has been able to detect yet. Basically space gets longer in one direction and then pulls back in the other direction, creating waves. Gravity waves, on the other hand, are important in climate science. They are intermediate scale phenomena that transport energy in the atmosphere. I asked him why it is important that we can see gravity waves on Pluto? He said that people tend to think that each little piece of knowledge that we gather will accumulate into greater and greater combined pieces of knowledge, and that great achievements can be made, but that it was seemingly doing little good, since we cannot take care of our planet and are making the environment we depend on toxic.

Why do some modern astrologers accept Pluto as a strong influential force, and not any of the other 77,000 orbiting bodies in the Kuiper belt?

What are some examples of resonances destabilizing each other? What are their proportions?

I’ve read a number of academic papers so far during the course of my research on Pluto and the music of the spheres.

The first one, titled Waves in Pluto’s Upper Atmosphere, is about the observation of gravity waves in, you guessed it, Pluto’s upper atmosphere. Gravity waves sound more complicated then they are. They’re simply waves through a fluid or air, or at the points where these mediums meet. All waves are effected by gravity. One example we all know are the tides, influenced by the gravity of the moon. Small ripples in water (capillary waves), up to large currents of energy in the atmosphere are forms of gravity waves. In this paper they used the light from a star behind Pluto, that traveled through Pluto’s atmosphere, to detect gravity waves in the upper atmosphere. The waves caused the light curving around Pluto from the star to change suddenly. The waves suggest that Pluto’s atmosphere is increasing, something that is predicted to happen as frozen gas on the surface melts when Pluto’s orbit gets closer to the sun.

The second paper is titled Orbital Resonances and Chaos in the Solar System. This is quite interesting. Resonances are a phenomenon where orbiting bodies enter into a proportional relationship with each other, and their gravities effect each other. What does this mean? Lets take a swing for an example. If you push someone in a swing at the same cycle that the swing is swinging the overall energy of the swing is doubled. Conversely, if someone is swinging themselves in the swing, they have to work twice as hard to get the swing to increase speed. This type of in phase relationship can happen on the solar system level as well. Pluto and Neptune have such a relationship. They are in a 3/2 proportional orbit, and their orbital paths cross over each other. Pluto takes 264 years to orbit the sun, while Neptune takes 165 years. 264/165 is 3/2: Neptune will make 3 revolutions around the sun for every 2 Pluto makes. When planets have small numbers in their proportional orbits like this, and they are close enough to each other, their respective gravities can influence, and even create resonances with each other. Pluto’s orbital path overlaps Neptune’s orbital path, but they will never run into each other because their resonance with each other has stabilized them out. Resonances don’t always stabilize out like Pluto and Neptune though. They can cause the motion to become more unstable and chaotic. It’s really fascinating that when such large scale energies become proportionally a-tuned with each other they can at times both cause stability and chaos.

The third paper, titled Augmenting the Acoustic Piano with ElectromagneticString Actuation and Continuous Key Position Sensing, is about using electromagnets to vibrate the strings of a piano. This is the technique I propose to use in the Pluto installation. Typically, electromagnetic vibration of instrument strings works by having two electromagnets, one that picks up the frequency of the string as it vibrates, and the other which vibrates the string at that same frequency in sort of a feedback loop. With a piano, this can become very expensive, very fast, due to the about 230 strings a normal piano has. What was developed and explained in this paper is a fascinating technique of having just one contact mic on the metal frame that the strings are attached to, to pickup the sum total of all the frequencies of the strings playing at any given moment. The component frequencies are then isolated via computer and sent to the appropriate electromagnets to vibrate the proper strings. Crazy!

The Music Instrument Museum in Phoenix, AZ is planning a Music of the Spheres exhibit, to be created by multiple artists. They would like artists to submit proposals to create one part of the exhibit. Each artist should choose a heavenly body that orbits the sun and extrapolate a new musical instrument from it. The piece each artists creates should encompass not only the Music of the Spheres as a whole, but also the specific qualities of that particular heavenly body.