Regarding Konstantin Saradzhev, Moscow's most famous bell ringer:
"[He was] known not just for his ringing but also for his superhuman aural acuity: between two adjacent whole tones, he perceived not just one half tone but a half tone flanked on either side by a hundred and twenty-one flats and a hundred and twenty-one sharps.
"When Saradzhev was seven years old, the sound of a particularly powerful church bell caused him to lose consciousness, and he was captivated for life. Although he was a skilled pianist, he always referred to the piano as that well-tempered nitwit:" a piano can produce only twelve tones per octave, whereas Saradzhev perceived one thousand seven hundred and one. This sensitivity perhaps explains Saradzhev's intense delight in Russian bells, which are unparalleled in their microtonal complexity. Each bell sounds a unique cloud of untempered frequencies, producing intervals unplayable on any twelve-tone keyboard. By such acoustic fingerprints, Saradzhev could distinguish all four thousand of Moscow's church bells. He described his hearing as "true pitch (by contrast with perfect pitch). The capacity for true pitch, he said, lay dormant in all humans, and would someday be awakened."
Elif Batuman
Onward and Upward with the Arts, “The Bells,”
The New Yorker, April 27, 2009, p. 22
_____________________________
Astronomers using the orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory have discovered a powerful "basso profundo" adding its notes to the music of the spheres.
The international team has detected sound waves generated by an enormous black hole at the center of one of the most massive galaxies known to astronomy. At 57 octaves below middle C on a piano, the black hole's "hum" is the lowest pitch ever detected from a celestial object.
Mel Gibson's voice:
108 vibrations per second
Lowest audible sound for humans:
20 vibrations per second
Lowest audible sound for elephants:
1 vibration per hour
Perseus cluster's emission:
1 vibration per 10 million years
Peter N. Spotts
The Christian Science Monitor
September 10, 2003
_____________________________
"Hunters on Big Laurel swore that an owl made utterments like those of a human, and though they found no agreement on its message, all confirmed that as the owl spoke, there appeared to be two moons in the sky."
Charles Frazier
Cold Mountain
_____________________________
"We're picking up an amazingly loud party near Alpha Centauri. They're only
about four light years from here. That's practically next door.... God. Music.
Four light years away."
Mary Doria Russell
The Sparrow
_____________________________
At night she took to walking out into the pampa and lying on her back to
look at the galaxy above, and sometimes, under the influence of that bright
flow of beauty, she would begin to tremble all over, to shudder with a deep
delight, and to hum an unknown tune, and this star-music was as close as she
came to joy."
Salman Rushdie
The Satanic Verses
_____________________________
