The Big Note
(via "beauty in music")

In 1965 at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, two radio
astronomers, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson,
developed a well-calibrated-supersensitive, 20-foot
horn-shaped antenna. The antenna was designed to
detect radio waves bounced off echo balloon satellites.
No matter where they pointed this antenna at the sky,
they heard the same hum. This was not their expected
result. Penzias and Wilson thought they had made a
mistake. They even considered the possibility that it
was due to "a white dielectric substance" (pigeon
droppings) in their horn.

Their puzzling findings were published in a famous
paper,Excess Antenna Temperature at 4080 Mc/s.
Penzias and Wilson were radio astronomers, with
expertise in electronics rather than cosmology. It
soon came to their attention through Robert Dicke
and Jim Peebles at Princeton that this unexpected
noise, this background radiation, had been predicted
years earlier by George Gamow as a relic of the
evolution of the early Universe.

Penzias and Wilson had, in fact, accidentally discovered
the Cosmic Background Radiation, the fingerprint of the
early Universe, the echo of the Big Bang. In 1978 Messrs
Penzias and Wilson were awarded the Nobel Prize in
Physics for their discovery.

The Cosmic Background Radiation is a residual
vibration from the explosion of the Big Bang, vibrating
at a frequency of 4080 Mega Hertz (4,080,000,000
Hertz). All vibrations can be interpreted as sound.
Octaves are defined as the lower frequency being half
that of its higher frequency. For example, A 3 = 440 Hz
and one octave above is A 4 at 880 Hz. Twenty-two
octaves below The Big Note (4,080,000,000 Hertz), is
calculated to be 972.75 Hz. This is slightly lower than B4
at 987.77 Hz and somewhat higher than B Flat 4 at
932.33 Hz, in equal-tempered tuning.

Therefore, the Universe is resonating at a tone a little
flatter than B, as defined by standard tuning. Physicists
think that time began with the Big Bang. Today, just
about every scientist believes in the Big Bang model.
The evidence is overwhelming enough that in 1951, the
Catholic Church officially pronounced the Big Bang
model to be in accordance with the Bible.

The Tibetan Gyuto Monks perform Buddhist ceremonies
while chanting on one fundamental note. Their refined
chanting technique enables each member of the choir to
sing a hree-note chord, exciting the harmonics of the
fundamental drone note. the monks are droning on a
note slightly flatter than B, exciting all the overtones
above. Their valve-less brass horns are designed to
play this note as the fundamental partial. The Gyuto
Monks have been resonating the Big Note for the past
500 years at the Gyuto Monastery in Lhasa, Tibet, now
living in exile in Dharamsala, India.


Beauty In Music ? 1992