“Music of the Spheres” is a term applied to an idea put forth by the Greek scholar Pythagoras (6th century BCE) and his followers, among them Plato and Kepler, that the proportional ratios used to describe musical intervals also refer to those of the physical universe, including the orbiting motion of planets. Pythagoras recognized the innate connection between musical sound, or its “pitch,” and the physical characteristics of an object producing that sound. He is credited with discovering the physical laws of musical sound through his observations that the ratio of mass - as in a vibrating string length sounding an interval - of a fifth is 2:3, that of an octave is 1:2, and that of the fourth is 3:4. Thus, he proved that there is a correlation between the vibrations of sound and the physical world, such as that of numbers and proportion. (See Music and mathematics.)
