We explore if there could be a sonic equivalent to the curvature of spacetime.
The question may sounds poetic. It is, and we treat it as a research programme. Acoustic cosmology proposes a sonic universe, the soniverse, built from a single fundamental particle and governed by laws borrowed from real cosmology and quantum mechanics. Some of those laws are causal (ie. the physics is self-consistent inside the soniverse), some are aesthetic (ie. personal choices and interpretations).
Framework
The Soniverse builds on small set of defined terms.
- Sonon. One wavelength: the fundamental particle of the soniverse, the equivalent of a photon. A sonon exists in a superposition of musical states and is only rendered musical by being heard. The listener is the observer and hearing can be considered its measurement (there can also be visual representations, but we’ll come back to that).
- Wave-time. Time in the soniverse has three independent dimensions: the sonon’s own wavelength, instrument time (how long an instrument plays), and performance time (how long a piece lasts). An instrument time can exceed a performance time.
- Temporal gravity. Sonons attract one another at intervals proportional to their relative density. Repetition within a local event horizon clusters them into mass, the soniverse’s equivalent of a rhythmic or melodic phrase, and clusters bend the wave-time around them.
- The epoch. The soniverse has a finite age, equal to or longer than the performance. Its big bang is the spontaneous creation of all sonons that can exist. It admits singularities, entropy, redshift and curvature.
A good place to start Gavin’s 2022 piece “Escape into the Multiverse: an Acoustic Cosmology“, Gavin & Andy’s Royal Astronomical Society presentation “Adventures in Acoustic Cosmology” (2017), and Andy Newsam’s soniverse model.
A very brief history of 2,500 years
The soniverse continues ideas that have been opening for 2,500 years.
Pythagoras and Kepler proposed a structural harmony between celestial motion and musical interval: Musica Universalis, a mathematical analogy rather than an acoustic one. Dennis Gabor (1947) gave sound an acoustical quantum, an irreducible cell in the time-frequency plane governed by an uncertainty relation, with Gaussian elementary signals as its atoms. Claude Shannon (1948) abstracted information from its medium entirely, making entropy measurable across any signal. Iannis Xenakis (from the late 1950s) composed with Gabor’s quanta, building a stochastic practice that became granular synthesis, later codified in Curtis Roads’ Microsound. The spectralists (Grisey, Murail) derived harmony from the physics of timbre itself.
It’s worth noting that we didn’t come across Gabor’s direct work until we were some way into the work, although obviously Xenakis and Roads were key influences.
However, each of these map physics onto sound. Acoustic cosmology runs the other way: it constructs a physics from sound, with the sonon as a first principle rather than a metaphor. The parallel evolution of musical language, from monophony through tonality and the romantic orchestra to minimalism and the synthesised grain, is part of the same story: each era’s music presses on the limits of its era’s description of the universe.
Some directions of travel
Research is ongoing, often [cosmologically] slow, and we are adding work, examples, presentation to this site as we go.
- Music of the hypersphere. If the universe may be finite and curved, what is the music of a curved, finite sound-space? The topology of the soniverse, from the 3-sphere to the Poincare dodecahedral space, as a compositional structure rather than a backdrop.
- The shape of musical language. Mapping the evolution from monophonic to romantic to minimalist against the physics each era could describe, and asking what the language after minimalism looks like when the composer can write the laws of the universe the music inhabits.
- A grammar for the grain, in the visual arts. No equivalent of Roads’ Microsound exists for images: a treatise uniting the atomic unit (Kandinsky, Gabor), scale hierarchy (Mandelbrot) and algorithmic practice (Whitney, Reas). We keep noticing the shape of the missing book.
- Describing sound as material. Following the “data as art material” taxonomy work, publishing the soniverse’s own descriptive vocabulary so works of acoustic cosmology can be documented, compared and archived.
- Morphology meets cosmology. A three-way reading of Gabor’s quantum, Trevor Wishart’s sound morphologies and the sonon.
How to read this section
Nothing here asks to be taken on trust. Since 2026 the framework exists as working software, the Soniverse Engines, so the theory is demonstrable: where a page claims that redshift lowers a spectrum, a link takes you to an engine where you drag the slider and hear it; where an essay describes temporal gravity, a seed file reproduces the exact piece it discusses. Start anywhere, follow the links to the tools, and run the examples yourself. Read it, hear it, run it.