Whether human beings and extraterrestrials could communicate with each other using music. This is a question I was asked on the space show. It was inspired by the 1970s movie with this theme tune: 5 note theme
(if you don't see videos in this page, try reloading it).
That of course is from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and is the music the extraterrestrials used to communicate with humans in the movie.
"Mathematics is a way of communicating with other species from off the planet - but mathematics is also music. Wouldn't it be great if the maths was musical maths, and they started to communicate with each other through lights, colours, and musical tones", (Stephen Spielberg interview about the movie, 4 minutes in ).(He discusses the 5 note theme itself here, 4 minutes in to part 2 of the interview)
So is that just a rather fun movie idea, or is there something a bit more to it than that? Might we be able to communicate with ETs perhaps more readily in music than in other ways?
You can listen to the radio show here as a podcast: "Humans to Mars and other destinations in the solar system - with Robert Walker". I was asked the question about 53 minutes into the talk, via email, by Alan in Phoenix Arizona.
First of all obviously it's going to depend on the ET. Many human beings don't appreciate human music, either they just don't like it, can't hear it too clearly, or maybe are profoundly deaf.
More interestingly, the way ETs experience sound may be very different from the way we experience sound. A simple example, they might experience sound the way bats do, as a form of echo-location. In that case their music might be extremely difficult for us to understand unless it is translated into something we can understand, such as some kind of landscape, 3D shapes or whatever.
Bats echo-locating - if ETs use sound like this, it might be really hard for us to understand their music, which may describe landscapes and 3D shapes
Blind people of course also use a similar method to feel the positions of things in their surroundings when they tap their cane on the ground. Famously David Kish uses echo location to "see" the world, and here he describes what it feels like, this may give some idea of what echo-location may feel like for a bat type ET.
Blind as a Bat: Seeing Without Eyesight
His echo location doesn't just give him the positions of the objects around him, it also lets him e.g. tell the differences in texture and density. For instance he can hear the difference between a metal and a wooden fence. See Human echo location: using tongue clicks to navigate the world, for more about it.
Most of us haven't learnt to echo-locate like this; but we do have some spatial experience of sounds. You might surprise yourself here, get someone else to clap (with your eyes shut) and try to point in the direction of the clap. You might be surprised at how accurately you can pinpoint exactly where the sound came from.
Try this binaural recording of a "Virtual Barber's Shop" - warning, it can be a bit scarily realistic at times. You have to listen to it with headphones or earphones to appreciate it, and its best if you use the closed type headphones.
Or for a gentler example, this immersive natural 3D audio scene, again to appreciate it you have to listen to it with headphones.
Try also this binaural recording of Leicester market and other binaural examples in Wikimedia commons.
So, this maybe gives us some idea of what it might be like to perceive sound like a bat. We are especially good at horizontal spatial resolution. We also have a certain amount of resolution vertically. And we have a surprising amount of audio depth perception as well especially for nearby sounds.
It's partly due to the reflection of sound off our shoulders, and the shapes of our ears. And also there are other cues such as reverberation and the way sound bounces off objects in our environment, and this helps to give us a sense of depth as well. Also of course, sounds getting quieter as they get further away, as well. See this summary of some of the main 3D audio cues for sound synthesis.
So when you pay close attention, we do have rather fine spatial experience of sound, and we do actually respond to this, but are not much aware of it in our daily life. It is not really made much use of in our music, or at any rate is quite rare for it to be made much use of in our music, in any significant way.
We do make some use of this in music of course, for instance the way the instruments are spread out in an orchestra, it feels more immersive if you've got this three dimensional component to it, and play the recording in stereo or a binaural recording. But you can still appreciate music very much so when you listen to it in mono.
So, it's interesting to think about, what if ETs experienced light the way we experience sound, and experienced sound, the way we experience light.
This can bring out how unusual is the way we experience sound.
When we listen to sound in mono, what we hear is not even one dimensional, it is zero dimensional, like a single point.
The equivalent in vision would be to reduce an entire painting or an entire movie to a single torch shining a single colour - and for the movie, with changes of colour, from time to time. You would lose most of the essence of the movie if you did that. While if you reduce a movie sound track to mono you don't lose that much, you can certainly still follow and understand the movie.
It would be a bit like these movie barcodes where an entire movie is compressed into a bar code - except, each moment in the movie would be just a single point of colour, not even a vertical line of varying colour.
If ETs experienced light similarly to the way we experience sound, then when they watch some event together with us, this is what they might see.
That is - except, these pure colours would be to them a much richer more immersive experience than it is for us of course, multidimensional in frequencies, as rich as monophonic music is for us.
That's because we experience sound in a very different way from the way we experience light. We have numerous tiny hairs in the cochlea, a spiral structure in our inner ears that respond to different frequencies. With these, we can hear lots of different frequencies simultaneously, and pick them all out and pick out the intensity of every single frequency. And you can hear relationships between these frequencies of octaves and fifths and things like that.
Whereas in light, we have numerous receptors, in our retina at the back of our eyes, but they are all tuned to just a few different colours, and black and white. So we have black and white, and three colours, most human beings. Dome have less, and rarely, we may have four colour receptors.
On the computer screen we have very high spatial resolution but individual pixels use just three colours to build everything, red green and blue - because the way light mixes is different from the way paint mixes, so just using different intensites of red green and blue you get all the colours on the computer screen.
For us, a normal yellow such as you see on the computer screen is completely indistinguishable from a mixture of red and green light. Unless it is a very intense yellow, we simply can't tell if we are looking at a mixture of red and green light or at yellow light.
This shows how light is represented on a computer screen. The three points are the three pixels, red green and blue. All the other colours are created by mixing them in different proportions. So, for instance, an equal mixture of red and green gives yellow (half way between red and green in the picture.This can only give you colours within the triangle shown here, but that is enough to give a reasonably good reproduction for most purposes.
Colours outside of the triangle such as vivid yellows or greens can't be represented on a computer screen, so all the yellows you see on a computer screen for instance are slightly washed out [ to human eyes they are mixed a bit with white. For techy reasons, there is no choice of 3 colours that will work exactly - that's because although we have only three colour receptors (most of us except those with two copies of the "red" receptor) - there is no light that is able to stimulate only one of those receptors without stimulating the other two. Colour researchers may use equipment with many more than three "primary colours". And artists may notice that there is no photograph that ever reproduces the colours of their paintings exactly, especially saturated colours like bright yellows and reds simply can't be reproduced exactly, unless they are used as primary colours already in the equipment. E.g. you would need to load your printer with cadmium red paint before it could exactly reproduce a painting that uses cadmium red.
But the monitor does a pretty good job for a human. For an ET with colour perception similar to our perception of sound, a mixture of red and green light wouldn't even resemble yellow light, not even a slightly washed out yellow, never mind be indistinguishable from it. It would no more look like yellow than a chord of C G would sound like E to a human musician.
So if ETs experienced sound like that, they wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a chord consisting of a mixture of (say), C and G, or the single note E, both would sound exactly the same to them.
In light we have no experience at all of octaves or fifths, or frequency relations between different colours. If you shift something visually up by an octave in frequency, from red light at 4×10^14 Hz to violet light at 8×10^14 Hz, it seems like a completely different colour.
There is no "octave type" resemblance to it at all between red and violet, to human eyes (you might think there is a slight resemblance that violet has a "reddish tinge" but that's because our red receptors happen to be sensitive in the blue region as well more so than our green receptors - it is nothing to do with perception of octaves in light frequencies, and it doesn't seem like it is just the same colour shifted up an octave).
So our experience of light is very different from our experience of sound.
The ETs may be in a completely different environment from the Earth, where it is important to be able to distinguish many different visual frequencies, and to distinguish light in the same way that we distinguish sound, in our environment.
Certainly, seems no physiological reason why it should be impossible. We already have several different types of receptor in the eye, and some animals have more. Some birds, reptiles and fish are tetrachromats, with an extra colour receptor able to sense, usually, ultraviolet light. Indeed they mightn't have eyes either, their whole skeleton may be their eye as in this amazing brittle star that has no conventional eyes, but sees through calcite crystals and photoreceptors in its skeleton.
So, if it was important to be highly sensitive to the different frequencies that make up light, their eyes might have lots of different receptors just as we do, but all tuned to slightly different colours, and all together in a tiny spot, so they experience the different frequencies of the light in much more detail than we do.
It certainly seems physiologically possible though it doesn't seem that any Earth animals have followed that particular path, as far as I know.
So, let's just look at this a bit closer. If they look at a photograph, let's say, this photograph of a famous Monet picture, to us it seems full of many different colours, and a reasonable reproduction (if not perfect):
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But to an ET who experiences vision the way we experience sound, this is what they would see
All our photographs and movies would be like that, just various intensities of red, green and blue light. And for them the frequencies would matter much more than the spatial structure of the movies, if they saw vision the way that we hear sound. Our movies and photos would all seem very much the same to their eyes, and they might find it hard to see anything in them at all.
If they looked at the original of Monet's haystacks, they would see more colours of course as he used paint rather than just red green and blue pixels, but still would be limited, they would notice the pigments he used, and it might not at all resemble the colours that we think are similar.
The other way around, if they experienced sound in the same way that we experience light, then they might well decide to reduce everything to various intensities of three pitches, just as we reduce all colours to three colour frequencies in our computer monitors and movies. They would probably set standard pitches for them, just like the international standard RGB for computer monitors. This then would be thought adequate to represent all sound.
For instance if they standardized on a single octave (similarly to our vision perception) they might decide that middle C, G, and the C an octave above middle C are perfectly adequate to represent all sounds. So all their recordings of sounds, including e.g. if they made recordings of our music too, would consist of just those three notes, varying in intensity - and of course reproduced with ultra high spatial resolution.
In this situation then surely their visual art and ours would be mutually incomprehensible and same for their soundscapes and our music.
So that is one way in which their experience of sound might be different from the way we do. But this is just a translation issue. If they experience light the same way we experience sound, you can translate one into the other. So they might be able to experience our music by translating it into, say, light, and we might be able to experience their vision, similarly, by translating it into music.
This translation of vision into sound is something we do anyway BTW, for instance sometimes the engineers of radio telescopes will listen to the radio waves as sounds. You hear a lot more detail in the sounds like that. I don't know if it is put into practical use, but you get radio recordings translated into sound and it creates quite interesting sounds sometimes. You can hear things that way which you couldn't possibly see if it was translated into light.
Here is a NASA recording of electromagnetic radiation from Jupiter translated into sound.
Now another way in which their experience of sound could differ from human sound is that it could be much higher pitched or lower pitched than ours.
So, they might be like bats, the bat squeaks that some of us can hear are at the very lowest range for bats, and they make sounds that are far too high even for young children to be able to hear.
Or they might be very low in frequency like the infrasound of elephants, which are thought to be a significant part of their communication, and they communicate with each other miles apart, through infrasound. Human beings simply can't hear it at all.
Elephant rumbles in the jungle (BBC Worldwide) - transposed up into human hearing.
So this is a translation thing again, we can transpose it up in frequency, and down in frequency again, and we could hopefully appreciate their music, if it is based on similar principles to ours.
Then, another way it could differ is through the time sense. This is something not much talked about, quite rare in science fiction stories. Nearly always the ETs in science fiction stories experience time very much as we do. They don't speak incredibly quickly, and they don't speak incredibly slowly. They move at much the same speed we do as well, and they don't walk around like tortoises, and they don't move around as quickly as birds to either. There are some notable exceptions, but by and large there isn't much treatment of differing time senses in sci. fi.
Tortoises obviously, they must experience life at a much slower pace than we do, and for a tortoise, Lento, a very slow piece of human music, would surely sound extremely fast.
To this sloth, or to a tortoise, a "Lento" tempo, slow to humans, would seem very fast surely. Many ETs may have time senses similar to a sloth or slower; there seems no reason why they would have the same time sense as ourselves.
What seems like a comfortable pace of music to us, seems very normal relaxed, steady kind of pace, Andante, based on human walking pace, or based on human heart beat, about once a second or thereabouts - and if you go just double that, it sounds very fast to us. If you do just half of that, it sounds very slow to us. And if you do three times, it sounds extremely fast.
People who try to study the interactions of birds on bird tables need to slow it down with high speed cameras to see what is going on. They react to each other far more quickly than a human eye can follow.
Here is a video of hummingbirds on a bird table, it perhaps gives an idea of what it seems like to the birds themselves, at any rate their time sense must be much faster than ours to respond so quickly to each other and with such precision. Their heart goes 1000 beats per minute, so maybe their time sense is about 10-15 times faster than ours?
Slow Motion Hummingbirds - Slo Mo #15 - Earth Unplugged
Bird song also has details at a much higher speed than for human songs. Here is a youtube video of the song of a hermit thrush slowed down first to half and then to a quarter speed.
So, maybe the timesense of birds is about four times faster than humans, the way they experience the passage of time? While maybe for hummingbirds, it is more like tens time faster or more.
But again, this is a translation, you can translate a fast time sense to a slower one and so on.
There is some treatment of this in sci. fi. Perhaps the most notable is Robert Forward's "Dragon's Egg" neutron star story - where the ETs live on a neutron star and have a massively faster time sense - leading also to a greatly speeded up history too - in the few days of a human visit they advance from primitive technology, stimulated by the radar pulses from the spaceship to innovate, all the way to our level of technology and then well beyond it. Sometimes you get sci. fi stories about ETs with a massively slower time sense than ours too.
This perhaps gives an idea of what it might be like to relate to an ET with a massively speeded up time sense - so they go through their entire childhood in a few minutes of our time, like the ETs of Robert Forward's novel.
Birth to 13 years in 3 min. 30 sec. Time Lapse Lotte. (The Original)
With humans anyway music relates to the pace of our heart beats and is to do with the rhythms of our lives. Rhythm is something that may be much more common than pitch. Certainly just about all of the creatures on Earth, they have some rhythms in their life, like day and night, except for very few situations like the deep hydrothermal vents where there are really no changes from day to night and almost no changes in the seasons - and in caves. But in almost all other situations, there is the passage of day and night. There are also the rhythms of your body of course, and the rhythms of the seasons, rhythms of the lunar months as well, many rhythms in our lives.
It seems that many ETs also would have rhythms in their lives and they may have something that is a bit like music, so whatever else there is in their music, there might be some communication of rhythm, whether in sound, or light or whatever is their closest to our music.
Another thing that is almost universal amongst animals on the Earth is a sense of touch. Even amongst microorganisms. Even things like snails, they have a hard shell, but inside is a soft sensitive body, and they have a sense of touch as well.
And with a sense of touch, you also get a possibility of experience of pitch that way as well. For instance profoundly deaf musicians, Evelyn Glenny, the famous percussionist who is profoundly deaf - she experiences rhythms through her sense of touch - but she also has experience of pitch as well, so she can feel the pitches of notes through her hands and through her feet.
Evelyn Glennie How to truly listen Ted Talks, talks about how she hears sounds through her body about 8 minutes in. (See also TED page for this video).
Evelyn Glennie Hearing Essay on how she hears pitches through her sense of touch.
So you can have some experience of pitch as well through a sense of touch. So touch being so universal, there may be a certain kind of universality to music there as well. Perhaps if they can't appreciate it as sound, they might be able to experience our music as touch, and the sense of rhythm may be very common.
But in order to experience this sense of rhythm, you do need a time sense. It seems very likely that ETs would at least have very short term memory such as we have just for the last few seconds, so that they can react to things - but would they experience time beyond that the way that we do? If they live in an environment with many rhythms, and changes of day and night, you would think that locating things in time like that would be important, but we do have other aspects to our experience of time.
We don't experience time entirely linearly even as human beings. So, there is a way in which our memories are to a certain extent spatial. So, for instance you are much more likely to forget things if you walk through a doorway. If you walk the same distance but there is a doorway in between where you came to and where you go to, apparently you are more likely to forget what it as that you wanted to remember than if you don't walk through a doorway. See this Scientific American article: Why Walking through a Doorway Makes You Forget
There is also a non temporal way that we remember things from the distant past. So you might try to remember the name of someone you knew maybe 10 or 20 years ago, and you think, what was her name, was it Emma? Maybe it was Emily? Then a day or two later maybe you suddenly remember "Oh yes, she was called Amanda" - and you remember the name just like that and then you are absolutely sure at that point. But it is not like you go back in time and you remember a particular time, and eventually get back to however many decades ago it was, but it comes back, right in the present. There is no time sense, you don't know where that name comes from, in a way.
So, we have this in our memory. For ETs, it is possible that this might be much stronger for them, than our linear sense of time. They might not have a very strong linear sense of time.
It seeems to me that this is most likely to happen if the ETs live in a very steady environment like hydrothermal vents, but there may be entire worlds that are like that.
We actually have an example in our solar system. It is even not impossible, may be a bit far out but we certainly can't disprove the possibility, that there might be ETs living there.
Here I'm talking about a possible place in our solar system where there could be ETs and they could be completely undetected by us, and us by them.
Here is a picture of it, astronomer geeks here will recognize it instantly as one of the most recognizable objects in our solar system, with its surface largely white, ice covered, with numerous linear features running all over it in all directions
This of course is the icy moon of Europa, and it is thought to have subsurface oceans kept liquid by tidal effects of Jupiter and the other moons of Jupiter.
This is the second innermost Moon of Jupiter, and the interesting thing is, that it's sea or seas are hought to be quite oxygen rich becuase the high ionizing radiation of Jupiter, hitting on the surface ice, apparently creates very significant amounts of oxygen, by dissociating the water, to such an extent that even over the very long timescales and geological processes, eventually being subducted into the ice, it should make the oceans beneath very oxygen rich.
so there is the potential there for not just plant life but even animals like ourselves, creatures that need a lot of energy to survive. There are enough energy sources there, not just from the hydrothermal vents (if it has those) but also from the oxygen in the water.
So, whether or not there are ETs in the seas of Europa, and there are absolutely no ways of knowing right now, it certainly seems likely to be a very common habitat in our galaxy, and a place where ETs could evolve.
If you evolved there, in a deep sea, and especially if you didn't have hands, were a bit like dolphins or some such, you could have an advanced civilization (even perhaps with advanced mathematics), but no technology at all.
But even if you had hands, or even if you were like an octopus, quite dextrous, still it might be quite hard to do much even with intelligence and even with some way of manipulating things. You wouldn't have for instance fire. You wouldn't see things burn. You would have heat, and lava flows occasionally, and you might smelt iron or whatever at some point, once you develop intelligence and drop rocks into it or whatever, and route it into different places and so on.
So - ETs living in a deep ocean, they would be aware of extreme heat through their equivalent of lava flow diving, and they could work with the gentler flows, as in the second video, but it would be hard to control it and make use of it, and attempts to do that might be quite hazardous for them. Also they would not be able to generate fire themselves, at least, not nearly as easily as for humans.
So, if there are ETs in Europa - or in other places like that in our galaxy, you can imagine their most advanced technology would probably be quite limited. Probably not likely to develop the computer chip or spacecraft or things like that. Maybe even after billions of years, they would never even think of such things. If there are ETs there of course there is no reason at all for them to be of similar age to us as a civilization, indeed that would be a remarkable coincidence if they did. Is far more likely that they evolved to intelligence and civilization millions of years ago..
Whether or not there is some ET civilization in Europa, there may be in other parts of the galaxy, and they may eventually one way or another, either we travel to find them - in case of Europa if we eventually explore it, in a very careful way of course, not to cause any harm to Europa, maybe if there were ETs, a very remote possibility maybe - but they might be our first ET contacts - if ther were ETs in Europa.
Then, they might have a very different time sense from us. In an environment like that, completely covered in ice, no experience of the sun, totally unaware even that the external universe exists at all, and a steady environment - the floor may be a bit warmer, the ceiling of their world would be ice, for them it might be much more important for memories to be organised spatially rather than according to time.
This is just my own idea, an idea I'm throwing out. I haven't seen anyone else suggest it, but it just seems a possibility (of course also possible they have similar time self to ourselves).
So if you imagine that they are able to appreciate music, they might understand pitches organized in a different way from the way we do, not in terms of rhythm, but in some kind of spatial way of organizing the pitches.
There is actually a whole idea that has been developed in modern music of this musical geometry. I'll talk about that in the next article when I talk about some of the range of different types of human music and what they might tell us about how ETs might experience music. So there are these musical geometries where musical pitches can have a location in space, and music can be quite static because of that, a kind of weightless, and static effect to it.
For a taste of this musical geometry, you can try the hexany, one of the "CPS sets", musical geometries, designed by Erv Wilson, which is a musical scale with the pitches at the vertices of an octahedron.
Octahedron. The hexany has notes on the vertices of an octahedron, and perhaps may give us some idea of what music might be like for an ET with a different time sense with sense of time which isn't linear and ordered like ours, or if they have only a weak linear sense of time, and no sense of rhythm.
The hexany is an octahedron designed so that when you click on an edge you hear the dyad of two notes connected by that edge, and when you click on a face you hear the triad of the three notes that it connects together. You can have a go at playing the notes and chords of a hexany online on my hexany page here. (Sadly, I can't embed it directly into this web page). You will need to give permission for java to run, to try it out, and it may take a minute or two to load all the audio clips you need to play the notes.
These structures have been used a fair bit by modern microtonal composers, notably by Kraig Grady.
David Keenan's "Tumbling Dekany", is another way you can try out these musical geometries for yourself - it is a musical Excel spreadsheet, so you need Excell to hear it, but it gives you an idea of this five dimensional structure of musical pitches. For the mathematics behind it, see the Wikipedia article about the hexany here.
For all we know, our Earth linear sense of time that we have might be quite unusual in the galaxy, if most of the ETs live in environments like Europa, we may come across ETs that don't think in a linear time sense way, the way human beings do.
This might make communications with them quite difficult. There are one or two interesting science fiction stories about that, about ETs that simply don't think in a linear fashion. it is quite a fun idea to explore, and then you can think about maybe this spatial music might be one of the few ways we can have mutual appreciation of their culture, and them of us.
This is totally speculation of course. We've not met any ETs yet so have no way to know, if they are likely to be very similar to us, or perhaps, so different in their ways of thinking that we might have only a few points of contact. If so perhaps music might be one of those few points of communication indeed, so long as we can translate, and given the variety of human music.
So I thought it was quite fun to follow this question up like this.
I'm going to do a second article, to follow this up further. I'll talk about the variety of human music - I think you'll be surprised at what a range of different types of music we have. The music you hear all the time on the radio is limited both in pitch and rhythmically. In terms of pitch, most of it is limited to just 12 notes out of the almost infinite range of possibilities, and it is limited to just a few rhythms, most of it, and rhythms like 4 beats to a measure are very common.
Is this something that we would have in common with ET music, this limitation to 12 notes in the octave, equally spaced (with some variation in intonation of each one) and preference for a few time signatures such as 4/4 for most of our music? Actually you can look around and there are lots of different ways that pitches and rhythms are organized in human culture, these structures in music that have become so prevalent in the last century or so are just a few of many types of musical structures used world wide. There are also many diverse structures invented and used by modern composers with interest in microtonal music or complex rhythms. Perhaps this will tell us something. And perhaps there are things that are also universal between different musical systems. So that's what I'm going to look at in the next article.
