Following the title track with the same name of my new album, “Ticket to Mars”, I’ve released three more songs, starting with “Hello”.
Mixing and mastering by Luke Garfield, Banana Llama Studios. Lead vocals by Ben Alexander.
Hello – first contact
The interesting thing about the alien in the lyrics, is that he speaks in musical notes, presumably so that he can communicate through touch by feeling the vibrations, or in this case, the music waveforms. I got this idea from Science Fiction novels and films, particularly “Project Hail Mary”, a novel by Andy Weir.
“Hello” is about an astronaut, out in a remote part of the galaxy, and an alien being from another planet, encountering each other for the first time. What would they say, if anything? I wondered to myself, when I got the idea for a song. How do you greet one another in outer space, if you are two different species? Probably by saying “hello”, in one way or another.
As I understand it, this process, of converting just about any type of data, like letters or numbers, into sounds, or music notes, is called “sonification”. There are examples of actual sonifications online. Recently, NASA’s Hubble spacecraft recorded sound waves from nebulas, but, since there is nothing and no-one in outer space to hear that, these vibrations have not been “heard” until now. They have now used sonification to convert that unheard noise into melodies, or melodic phrases.
Oh, hi there…
The first notes of “Hello” is a variation of the five notes (D3-E3-C3-C2-G2), used to greet the alien spaceship in the film “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977). My notes are a variation, since the original did not work melodically.
The notes that the screenwriters and soundtrack composer decided on at the time that the film was made, were random, and no established algorithm was used to convert the letters, supposedly spelling out “h-e-l-l-o”, to notes. This is not sonification, but nevertheless, the musical phrase became a famous meme in its own right.
Words to notes
These days there are a few options for converting text to notes, for instance, a program called Solfa Cipher, which I tried out. However, I couldn’t figure out how their system works (or the equivalent values) and the results were different from other similar apps. But it was fun playing with it.
Sonification
These days, the most standard method for this any kind of sonification (letters to sounds, and vice versa) is by using a programming language called Python. I haven’t tried it – that’s stuff for MIT nerds. However, the idea remains – if humans were ever to meet aliens in outer space, chances are that, of all the languages that could be used to try to communicate with them, numbers and music notes will probably work best, since they are not dependent on human interpretation or context in order to be meaningful. Music is essentially Mathematical – a different form of a numbers system used in communication.
Lyrics – Hello
Lyrics © 2024 Marthe Bijman
Who are you, stranger? Where are you from ? Where is your home? I am pleased to meet at this rendezvous. How do you do. Greeting, Earthling, Human Being, say hello. This word we know: Say Hello. You don’t have eyes, I see. But I think that you can hear me. And you speak in music From beyond this sphere. What do you hear? Could you be from Eris, so pale and so serene? With a single moon spinning ‘round a lifeless scene? Could life have been? You have made a bridge from your ship to mine ‘cross space and time. Here and now, in orbit we can connect. Take the first step.