We learn in high school that sound waves do not travel through a vacuum and that all planets and stars therefore traverse space in silence. Yet despite the efforts of underpaid schoolteachers around the world, it seems that people cannot resist imagining the sounds of space and, more importantly, of celestial bodies. In the absence of actual sound, humans have simply invented what outer space ought to sound like, from Pythagoras’ musica universalis to the vrooming of Millennium Falcon and the spooky woodwinds in Stockhausen’s “Sirius.”
