Every moon, heard: I played all 459 known moons from their own orbits by one law, and it found 76 pairs that beat between the ears
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: One law turns every known moon, 459 of them, into sound, and finds 76 binaural pairs, 54 among Saturn's 268 irregular moons. I built it over JPL's table of planetary satellite mean elements and played the moons in eleven pieces of 120 seconds. Each moon's orbital frequency is raised by whole octaves to the octave nearest 220 Hz, a hertz being one vibration a second. Two moons whose periods lie within 50 cents of a power of two take one ear each and beat, a cent being a hundredth of a semitone. Every other moon stands where JPL Horizons puts it in the sky, a bell sounds when neighbouring moons line up as seen from the planet, and the planet's recorded voice runs 18 dB beneath. Two searches found no earlier music for about 410 of the 459 moons. The law also hears what kind of period a table prints: Io and Europa lie 0.00 cents from an octave in JPL's table and 6.30 cents in NASA's fact sheets. This record holds the paper (OCO paper IP-A20) and its 11 sounds. Headphones. Part of The sound of the sky: 12 papers and their sounds: 10.5281/zenodo.23986764.
Author: Ivanov, Ivan Petrov
Language: English
Subfield: Music
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225339660