The music of the spheres turns out to be a mixture of whistles, chirrups, howls, static and something that sounds like chattering voices. Oh, and a string quartet and a choir.

The string quartet and the choir were not Don Gurnett’s idea. The mind of an astrophysicist tends to favour the hard evidence. But it was Gurnett who built the devices that captured the whistles and chirrups as Nasa’s Voyager probes hurtled past Saturn, Uranus and Neptune on their 25-year journey into deep space, and he was there to share a standing ovation when they formed part of Sun Rings, an hour-long piece written by Terry Riley for the Kronos Quartet and a 60-voice choir, given its world premiere at the University of Iowa’s Hancher Auditorium recently.” Guardian UK