But, for reasons that are still unclear, there was a clumpiness in the early Universe - some areas were a little denser than others, and it was these denser areas that would eventually become stars and galaxies. If the Universe had remained as it began, a completely homogenous, smoothed-out volume of energy, then galaxies, stars, and people could not exist today. The reason that there was such a vast deep tone in the infancy of space and time is closely connected to one of the most mysterious and important aspects of the Universe’s history: structure, of which sound is a signpost. It would not, however, have been an audible sound to any eared creatures, could they have existed so far back in time, before even the stars were born: a vast objet like the Universe makes a very low sound indeed - about one trillionth of a hertz. And, this was not the random roar of white noise that one might perhaps expect - it was a sound with a pitch: it had a characteristic wavelength. But, in cosmic terms, the Universe was not silent for long - 380,000 years later (a mere 0.0003 per cent of its present age), it was filled with sound. With no space to expand into, there could be no medium around it into which sound waves could possibly propagate. In Discord: The Story of Noise ( public library) from Oxford University Press, sound scholar Mike Goldsmith, former Head of the Acoustic Group at the UK National Physical Laboratory, explores the flipside of the cultural evolution of silence by tracing our relationship with noise, the history of sound, and where our auditory future might take us.Īmong the many fascinating and counterintuitive facets of noise Goldsmith examines is the very dawn of sound, in a chapter titled A Silent Bang:ĭespite a promising name, the Big Bang was silent - a sudden burst of energy in which time and space began, forming the Universe as it spread. Questions of what sound is, why its digitization is a dangerous thing, and how it bleeds into other senses have long fascinated thinkers and listeners alike.
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