DESCRIPTION:
A colleague of mine recently shared a Snapple™ lid with me, which said “The nothingness of a black hole generates a sound in the key of B flat.” That sparked my curiosity. I did some internet digging and found an article on www.science.nasa.gov that further inspired me:

“Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have found, for the first time, sound waves from a supermassive black hole. The "note" is the deepest ever detected from any object in our Universe… In musical terms, the pitch of the sound generated by the black hole translates into the note of B flat…57 octaves lower than middle-C…this is the deepest note ever detected from an object in the Universe.”

Steve Allen, an investigator with NASA, says, "The Perseus sound waves are much more than just an interesting form of black hole acoustics. These sound waves may be the key in figuring out how galaxy clusters, the largest structures in the Universe, grow."

Those of us involved in choral music have always known that singing brings people together in cosmic ways. Now we know that music may also be intrinsic to the very structure of the universe!

Singularity in Bb uses overtone singing over an opening B flat drone to symbolically represent the sound of the Perseus black hole and the “music of the spheres,” morphing quickly into a rhythmically-swaying, hypnotic setting of Walt Whitman’s lovely poem Gliding O’er All, accompanied by a subtle use of the hymn tune TERRA BEATA (This Is My Father’s World).

I hope you enjoy it!

-Timothy Michael Powell