Celestial Incantations
Location: Pulsar PSR B0329+54 (3,460 light years (3.27x10^16 km) from the Sun in the constellation of Camelopardalis)
Date: sound generated 3,460 years ago but detected at Earth relatively recently
Music: 12th Century vocals

We now leave our solar system behind and travel out to the brightest pulsar in the northern sky, PSR B0329+54, at a distance of 3460 light years from our Sun. A pulsar is a highly magnetised neutron star with a mass greater than the Sun but with a radius of only 10-15 km. A tablespoon of neutron star would weigh more than 1 billion tonnes – roughly the weight of Mount Everest! Radiation is beamed out along the magnetic poles and pulses of radiatiuon are received as the beam crosses the Earth. In this piece we hear the “sound” of the pulsar as recorded by the Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank. The rotation period is about 0.71 seconds so that we hear approximately 84 pulses per minute.

I have been realising and interpreting the music of the 12th Century mystic and abbess Hildegard of Bingen for over 20 years with soprano Heather Lee and she sings one of these works, one of our oldest scored pieces of music, and certainly one of the oldest pieces of music to survive that has been composed by a woman. This incredible music is over 900 years old, something that should make us gasp; yet it is dwarfed by the immense scale of time and space that we now enter. The combination of the chant and ‘sound’ is soothing and gives a sense of the vision of the heavens that Hildegard of Bingen imagined. This piece is taken from her collection, The Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations, a title that evokes our entire sounds of space project. Hildegard places us in all our fragility in this vastness and also asks us the most difficult of questions, how did this come to be? At the same time the pulsars ‘sounds’ have been arranged so that they phase in a manner which makes it hard to say when one occurrence starts and finishes, giving us a feeling of never ending spaciousness.

Artwork Inspirations: Talisman, recalling medieval album cover, calling to Earth, the beat of space, beauty, original artwork by Diana inspired by medieval iconography.

The track cover design is a layered digital collage created by Diana Scarborough. Some source material is from Wikipedia.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_constellations#/media/File:Suzhou_star_cartography.jpg

Lyrics

O pastor animarum et o prima vox, perquam omnes create sumus.
Nunc tibi placeat ut digneris nos liberare de miseriis et languoribus nostris.

O Shepherd, you of first voice, by whom we are all are fashioned,
Be willing to liberate us from weakness and sadness.