The Ratios — Oversized Drop-Shoulder T-Shirt

01 / 02

TEE-ART-RB-SPI-01-M-BK T-Shirt

Piece

The Ratios Oversized Drop-Shoulder T-Shirt

$ 2,345.00

Description

Spiegel's realisation of Kepler's Harmonices Mundi opens the Voyager Golden Record, launched in August 1977; the discs are still outside the solar system and nobody has heard them. The print is their trajectory.

A Author

Laurie Spiegel

B Subject

Computer Music

C Aesthetic

Diagram · Typographic

Exploration

Kepler held that the planets, varying their speed between the nearest and furthest points from the sun, run through musical intervals, and he wrote those ratios out as if they were notes. It was serious seventeenth-century astronomy and it sounds like mysticism.

Spiegel realised them on a computer in the seventies, keeping to the calculation. It is not a free interpretation: it is the orbits sounding.

That realisation is the first thing you hear on the gold-plated copper disc bolted to the side of the two Voyager probes, launched in 1977.

The probes left the solar system and are still moving away. The disc carries engraved instructions for building the device that plays it, drawn for somebody who shares no language.

Nobody has heard it out there and probably nobody ever will. It is the human object that has travelled furthest and the one least likely to be used.

Details