26.04.29 Dark matter music
https://megaphone.link/VMP9079049730
NOAM HASSENFELD (HOST): I think the most starstruck I’ve ever been going into an interview might have been when I was about to talk to Bob Wilson, the scientist who discovered the first direct evidence of the Big Bang.
And then when I finally talked to him, he was just so deadpan about the whole thing.
BOB WILSON (SCIENTIST): I didn’t realize at the time how big it was but I do now.
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But the reason I was so in awe of Bob wasn’t just because of his discovery. It was the way he made it. He listened to space using this huge, 50 foot microwave antenna shaped like a horn, and he heard this fuzz.
FUZZ
That fuzz is the cosmic microwave background. It’s the leftover radiation from the Big Bang.
And I got kind of obsessed with this antenna.
I'd always figured space and sound don't really mix. You know, space is a vacuum, so we can't hear any of it.
But when I learned about the horn antenna, how it translated microwave radiation into stuff scientists can hear... I don’t know, just the idea that you could listen to space and make a real discovery that helped solidify one of the most fundamental truths about the universe. That it had a beginning.
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I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. And I kind of wanted to go see it for myself.
But before I could, I talked to someone just as obsessed as I was. Who made her own kind of pilgrimage.
BEATIE WOLFE (COMPOSER AND ARTIST): When you read about something like the horn antenna, you think you're going to show up and there'll be security and you don't imagine you just drive up and there it is, this incredible gigantic, sort of ear trumpet open and free to anyone that wants to go and have a look. And when you say, okay, this picked up the birth of the universe. Yeah, well, you believe it. It has that kind of presence to it. How are there not lines of people wanting to see it?
Beatie Wolfe is a composer and a kind of artist jack of all trades.
BEATIE: I typically work across science and design and technology and the environment.
And a few years back, she was working on a new record, when she found out the horn antenna was right nearby. So she reached out to Bob.
BEATIE: We were chatting and I said to him, “Hey, you know, you've used this to receive, but have you ever used it to transmit?”
To send something out into space, instead of just listening.
BEATIE: And he's like, “Well, no, not really.” And I was like, “Well, in theory could it transmit? And he's like, “Ah, yeah, but it, I don't think it would work because you know, sound waves get to a point in the Earth's atmosphere and then stop.”
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But a few months went by, and Bob got back to her. He was all like:
BEATIE: “Beatie, I figured out how I can do it. I can do an update on the horn. So do you still want to do it?” It's like, yeah, absolutely.
So Beatie and Bob and a couple other people met up at the horn, Beatie brought some music she’d been working on.
BEATIE: And we played the first part of it, pointing it down at the ground.
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BEATIE: We used it as a loudspeaker and it sounds
NOAM: What?
BEATIE: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It sounds fantastic!
NOAM: Do you just plug into it? Like does it just have like a quarter inch input, like, what?
BEATIE: It. No, it does.
NOAM: What!
BEATIE: Yeah. Yeah! It has like a, a directionality. So if you are outside of the beam of the horn, it's almost inaudible, which is crazy. So you have to be in the horn's beam. But it was the most thrilling experience to, you know, hear the record sent directly to you. You know, and it kind of
NOAM: That is… oh my god. That’s just mindblowingly cool.
BEATIE: And then say ten or so minutes in, we then pointed it up and at that point you can't hear anything.
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BEATIE: It was amazing. It felt like such a special, quiet moment that the five of us shared. This kind of, “Hello, can you hear me?”
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Beatie's music shot out from the horn antenna toward the sky, and as it left Earth's atmosphere, it started to weaken.
Still strong enough to hear in orbit—if you had an antenna to pick it up—but by the time the signal got to the moon, it was completely enveloped by the sound of the cosmic microwave background.
FUZZ
BEATIE: It merging with the afterglow of the Big Bang I think is beautiful as well, because it's just this idea of us being so small and able to see so little of the bigger picture. We are just part of something so much bigger than us, and when you get a hit of that instead of feeling small, it actually makes you feel pretty magnificent.
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Beatie’s first broadcast happened back in 2017.
And then, a few months ago she put out a new album called Liminal—which she made in collaboration with legendary musician Brian Eno—and the music felt almost otherworldly to her. She and Brian describe it as “dark matter music.”
So they decided to fire up the horn antenna again and release their new album by transmitting it into space.
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It's the kind of thing Beatie does all the time with her work.
She releases an album in an anechoic chamber. She spearheads a research project studying the effects of music on people with dementia. She creates an audiovisualization of 800,000 years of CO2 levels.
But what really made me want to talk to her was the way she thinks about what music actually is. How we have this way that we can connect with each other without language that we don't really understand. And she thinks about what having that power means for the universe and for us.
I'm Noam Hassenfeld, and this is Unexplainable.
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NOAM: So let's start with your most recent album, Liminal. It's the third in a series of albums you released last year with Brian Eno.
BEATIE: Yeah
BEATIE: There was Luminal, there was Lateral, and now there's Liminal, which you call "dark matter music." So what do you mean by dark matter music?
BEATIE: Oh, I mean, it just seemed to say something that we couldn't really put into words about what it felt like to us. It felt to us like when we were making a lot of the pieces that became Liminal, we were in this strange new land and it's that which is there that we can't perceive that exists. But beyond our powers of perception. This feeling of almost, you know, what is there, but we haven't tuned into it yet.
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BEATIE: For some reason what connects in my mind with this idea is I went to see a series of Rothko paintings, and there was a black piece, you know, one of his large black paintings, and I sat on the bench in front of it and then thought, “Okay, yeah, I'm going to go.” And then—and then I couldn't.
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BEATIE: I felt like I had been anchored to this spot. And I ended up sitting in front of this painting for 25 or 30 minutes—I don't even know how long, and almost being moved to tears. I was so moved by it. And I didn't know what was happening. I was thinking, “What is this?” Like, “Am I on something?” You know? It's suddenly seeing all these things in this painting that weren't there. you know, realizing it on another level.
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BEATIE: I finally left and and then I saw that there was a breakdown of these pictures showing them under UV light and showing how many layers and textures you could see when you viewed the painting I'd just been looking at under UV light and it was this realization of like, oh, informationally it was registering, something was registering, but I wasn't able to process it.
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I just think we know so little, really, about what's going on. And it's almost that humility. I think dark matter to me is a kind of humility that we are just dipping our toe into this whole pool of understanding that is often so beyond description.
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BEATIE: So Brian and I have been making all this music, which has just been wild really, you know, we've got to the point of having made almost 800 pieces of music in the space of a year and a half.
NOAM: 800 pieces of music?
BEATIE: Yeah
NOAM: Oh my god
BEATIE: It's, it's crazy. So when I last looked, it was, you know, 778 or something like that.
NOAM: Wow
BEATIE: And it's going out in so many different directions.
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BEATIE: You know, we had Luminal was “dream music.” That's what we used to describe it. Lateral was “space music.”
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BEATIE: Not space in terms of outer space. Space in terms of landscape. In terms of a horizontal plane. But then Liminal, dark matter, it's that which is there that we can't perceive.
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BEATIE: You know, William Blake talks about how human beings used to have enlarged numerous senses. I do feel that. I think we are often missing so much of what's around us, and so this feeling of almost, you know, what is there, but we haven't tuned into it yet.
NOAM: Yeah. Do you know Blake quote it's like, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite.”
BEATIE: Yes. That's exactly, that's exactly it.
NOAM: I love that.
BEATIE: Oh me too. Oh, I mean, and Liminal, I would say that there is nothing that's really fixed. Often within the tracks there are, there are a lot of elements that are changing and quite subtly. That's, to me, what makes something feel alive. Really thinking about how you make something feel like it still has the messiness of a human presence and where you don't know why, but it just feels like it's part of an environment as opposed to part of a music studio.
SCORING OUT
NOAM: Yeah. I’d love to be able to dive into some of the specific songs on the album, and I guess I’m wondering if I were to ask you which is the song that feels the most like dark matter to you, which track would you pick?
BEATIE: Well, the one that to me really feels like dark matter, whatever dark matter feels like—again, we're having to take great leaps of the imagination—is a track called Ringing Ocean.
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BEATIE: Which has a sense of depth and breadth and spectrum to it. It almost feels like it's, I don't know, it feels like you're falling off the world, you know, or you're…
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BEATIE: Sinking into the deepest wormhole, or you are expanding out across galaxies and it has this feeling of no borders, you know, of nothing that can contain it. That to me is what gives me the feeling of dark matter.
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BEATIE: The reason this track also has a kind of particular gravitas to it for me is because after we made it, I went out to Portugal to visit my mom. And I was sitting in this little area of the national park that's by her house on a rock. And all around was a panoramic view of the Atlantic. You know, that was surrounding me. And I thought, oh, I'm gonna listen to this track that we just made. We'd made it maybe five days before. But it just suddenly felt like it needed to be played in that environment with this whole view of the ocean all around and these swallows, dancing in the air and this wonderful open sky.
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BEATIE: So I played it through the kind of shitty speakers, just ambiently, you know, with the other environmental noise. And so I thought, oh god, I kind of want to even call Brian so he could hear it in this environment. But I had not taken my phone. So I walked back to my mom's house, which is a five minute walk after listening to the track. And I saw, I had a message from Brian saying, I just listened to that song we made the other day. And we had been listening to that song in exactly the same moment. He was, you know, in Norfolk and I was in Portugal, completely unplanned synchronization. And so now, whenever I hear that, I kind of have that rolling ocean and, you know, portals and black holes and just, you know, this sense of these worlds lining up.
SCORING OUT
NOAM: The feeling that I get when I listen to it is, I—you mentioned sitting on a rock, looking out in the ocean, and I just have an image of standing in a field, looking up at the stars, feeling like the universe is really big and enormous and, and also scary. Like feeling small in the face of something big is kind of a comforting emotion and it's also kind of a deeply anxious emotion.
BEATIE: Oh yeah. See, you said it better. I mean, I shouldn't really comment. I should—and actually a lot of the time I think both of us don't like to, to say too much sometimes, because, you know, the way I think about it is if this music could talk, what would it say? And that's almost how I find the right way of bringing a voice into that environment. It feels like a self as opposed to an ego perhaps. But there's something lovely about not actually having opinions about these pieces and seeing what people feel themselves and not giving anything that would inhibit, you know, or distract from that. It's somewhere in a space of being meditative and calming and maybe in, in a way encourages sort of transcendental spaces, but also isn't imposing. And somehow still stirs something.
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In a minute, Beatie points the antenna in a very different direction.
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[BUMPER]
NOAM: What do you think the point of music is? What do you think music is for?
BEATIE: I think music, the point of music is to remind us of who we are. Who we really are. And not who we think we are or we think we should be, or society has told us to be. I think music cuts through all of that and it goes to something very deep inside of us, which is our, let’s say our true self, you know? And it bypasses all the other shit really.
NOAM: Yeah. You know, talking about reminding us of who we are, it makes me think of all the work you’ve done with music and dementia.
BEATIE: Yeah
NOAM: I wonder if you can just tell me a little bit about that.
BEATIE: So I came across Oliver Sacks—neurologist Oliver Sacks's Musicophelia in 2014, I think, or earlier, and I was so struck by how music activates almost the entire brain, you know, which is why when people have neurological conditions, it can bypass affected areas and, you know, hit somewhere else. You know, he made cases for its use across all these different conditions, and at the time, I didn't particularly think, oh, I'm going to go off and do work in this area. It wasn't even remotely in my mind. And then I found out that my family members were coming into, you know, the early signs of dementia and then rapidly progressing. So I thought, well, whenever I am going to see that family member, I will take my guitar and I'll play some songs and, you know, maybe it will have a neutral or potentially positive effect.
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BEATIE: So I went to visit this relative in Portugal. And I had asked, you know, the care home director, “Look, can I play some music to this loved one?” And he said, “Yeah, but actually would you mind playing to everyone?” So it was 40, 50 people. And I was playing these new songs, you know, I'd written. So I was thinking, I mean, of course I'll do it, but it's probably not gonna do any good, and, you know, before I started most people were asleep.
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BEATIE: And it really suddenly felt like, oh!
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BEATIE: You know, I was looking around the room and people were sort of clapping and singing along at all stuff that they were hearing for the first time and at the end of the performance, the director comes up and says, “You know, the ten years I've been here, this is the best I've ever seen the group.” So I thought, well. You know, maybe I'll go ahead and do a project around this.
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Beatie was particularly floored by what happened because most of the patients in Portugal had never heard her music. Most of them didn’t even speak English. But they still reacted.
At that point, most research on music and dementia had focused on familiar music. That triggering a kind of memory through music could be a way to maybe, temporarily get through to someone.
BEATIE: So with dementia it would be that, you know, that person was then brought back into themselves, you know? There were some very powerful examples using music that had a strong memory component to it where that was a kind of cornerstone piece of music for that person. But there was also nervousness because of that. Because what if I played a song that had a negative charge or it wasn't the perfect song for that loved one?
So Beatie put together a small pilot study where she went into care homes in the UK, she gave a 30 minute performance of original music, she had people listen to her music on headphones for two weeks, and even though they’d never heard the music before, most of the patients responded to it. A lot of them even danced along.
And since then, researchers have continued to show that dementia patients can respond to music even when they don’t have any personal connection to it.
BEATIE: There was a guy called David. It was the first performance I gave in the UK, and his family had stopped visiting because they thought it was hopeless, really. He was asleep all the time. And when the carers heard that, you know, we were having this performance, they were hoping to get a smile or, you know, something, just a sign of engagement to send to the family to say, David's still here.
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BEATIE: And within the first 20 seconds of the first song, David had woken up. And he started to move his arm in perfect time, back and forth with the music.
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BEATIE: Like a kind of wave, you know, and, his eyes were wide. He was moving in his chair. By track four he was getting up and one of the carers went over, you know, to help him. And he was dancing. He was dancing with one of the carers.
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BEATIE: And this was being filmed by one of the other people there to share with the family. They couldn't believe it. They absolutely couldn't believe it.
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BEATIE: There was another woman called Anne who had stopped speaking. So she'd, you know, been nonverbal for nine months. And halfway through the first song, she starts singing along, you know, with this amazing choral soprano voice. And this is a song, again, she's not heard before, but she's singing along and it's just amazing. There were so many examples with every person that I got to know of it doing something, you know, inexplicable.
NOAM: What do you think is going on there?
BEATIE: I think…
NOAM: I know it's tough!
BEATIE: I mean, the thing with music is when someone is, you know, in a way where they physically can't get up and dance or do other sorts of therapies that also might be very beneficial at unlocking, you know, something, where almost all they can do is passively absorb something. That's the wonderful thing about music is it's not asking anything from you. It's something you can absorb and who knows why or how it can unlock, it can magically transform something that seems completely stuck and impenetrable.
SCORING - PART OF US
When I was listening to Beatie talk about her work playing music to dementia patients, I couldn't help but think about her experience looking at that Rothko painting.
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You know, it just looks like a bunch of black paint, but there are all these different, unseen layers that really make it what it is.
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And then you've got people with dementia, where it can be hard to know what they're taking in. But it seems like music can reach them.
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There's something happening under the surface that you can't see. That maybe scientists can't even describe.
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BEATIE: When something is beyond description, you know, it's an experience. It's something that—you know those times where you have been forever changed by something, you know, watching a film in the cinema or listening to a record or reading a book, and it's not that anything really has shifted outside of you. It's an internal shaping that will stay with you forever.
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I think this is what ties Beatie's work together. An album of dark matter music being sent out into space and music reaching dementia patients.
Even when there's so much we don't understand, even when we've forgotten a lot of what we used to know, we still have the capacity to be moved.
And at the end of the day, I don’t really think we know how. That's why I love how she calls it “dark matter music.”
You know, scientists tend to call all kinds of things dark matter just to show how much we don't know. There's viral dark matter. There's nutritional dark matter. There's the dark matter of the ocean.
And then there's music.
Which works in so many ways we still don't understand. And that, I think, is what drew Beatie to music in the first place.
BEATIE: I write music because it's the closest feeling to magic that I have come across. A lot of the pieces of music that I've written, it feels as if something is just showing up and you are receiving it. And I often would record, you know, on my phone, just on the voice memos, feeling like, okay, there's a song here. And I would listen back to it afterwards and write out the words that I'd sung pretty spontaneously.
SCORING
BEATIE: It's just feeling like you are part of something bigger. All of a sudden you are sitting somewhere and you feel as if you're the horn antenna and you’re picking up cosmic microwave radiation and you're thinking, “Wait, there's something that's shown up, you know, and ooh, this feels interesting and I need to, I kind of need to capture it."
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SCORING - PROCESSION
You can find Beatie and Brian’s three most recent albums, Luminal, Lateral, and Liminal on Apple Music, Spotify, or any of the music places. Most of the music in this episode comes from her latest record, Liminal—the one you’re listening to right now is one of my favorites, it’s called Procession—but there was some stuff in there, including tracks from her earlier records, Raw Space and Montagu Square. You can also go to beatiewolfe.com to find her older music and learn more about all kinds of other projects she’s worked on. B-E-A-T-I-E-W-O-L-F-E dot com.
This episode was produced by me, Noam Hassenfeld. It was edited by Lissa Soep, with mixing and sound design from Cristian Ayala. Meradith Hoddinott runs the show, Melissa Hirsch checks the facts, and Joanna Solotaroff and Sally Helm are the fact that some parts of space have dense enough gas that there actually is sound out there. The Perseus black hole is vibrating at a B-flat. Just 57 octaves below middle C.
And Byrd Pinkerton ran towards the backwards overhead light. When people were walking underneath it their shadows almost seemed to split. Like they were running away from each other. And when she looked at the wall, right in that spot, she thought she could make out the faintest glimpse... of a crack.
SCORING
Thanks to Nick Butterworth for his help on this one. Thanks as always to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show along with me and Byrd. And if any of you out there have thoughts about the show, send us an email! We’re at unexplainable at vox dot com. You can also leave us a review or a rating wherever you listen. It really helps us out.
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Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we’ll be waiting for you right here next time.