'Fly me to the Moon'

Now part of the 'Suborbital Harmonic Resonator' installation

Play now . . .

Play the web version of this movie Fly Me (160Kb). You'll need the Flash Player (5 or above) for this.
Or . . . view this piece at Rhizome.org.
Note: best viewed on PC, and that's not because we don't like Macs, honest :-)

Instructions: Turn your speaker volume up and stand back from your computer for a few minutes. Listen to the sounds of the cosmos: from pulsars to Jupiter's magnetosphere, from recordings from the Apollo 11 landings to the sounds of Sputnik.

or Download

flyme.exe [PC file 0.9Mb]	flyme.hqx [Macintosh file 1.3Mb]
How to play the downloaded flyme file: Save this file to your computer double click it to play (does not require Flash player) Press P to start the display. Press the ESCAPE key (top left of your keyboard) to exit the program.

Notes

This presentation is delivered in Macromedia Flash, so you'll need the Flash player.
Fly me to the Moon is an attempt to recreate the music of the spheres.
It was projected as part of the OX1 Festival in Oxford, 2001 and is now available on the web.

A kiosk version is presently touring.

In 1618 Johannes Kepler completed a motet, successfully re-creating the harmonious chord calculated from the ratios of the planets' orbits to the sun.
In 1852 the painter Hermann Goldschmidt made the first of his fourteen asteroid discoveries from a small room in a café in Paris.

Inspired by these brilliant and slightly odd people, Alun Ward has created Fly me to the Moon, a Flash installation which uses random methods to drive asteroids across a projected screen. As they pass by on their lonely journeys, they seem to generate sounds. Human and extraterrestrial noises coincide on the otherwise silent screen, and a new music of the spheres is born.

Additional links to sounds:
http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/sounds/sounds.html

contact: