The earth, as a musical instrument, knows two fundamental notes to which her body naturally oscillates: one with a vibration period of 53.1 minutes, the other of 54.7 minutes. Thus she sings a rather dissonant chord, like striking two adjacent keys on the piano. To be explicit, of course I should say Earth rather rings than sings, for solid planets are really more like gongs than lutes, and her ringing is sundered by her spinning, which perforce concentrates its energy around her swift equator while leaving her poles idling. She even dings forth a third and torsional note of higher pitch (42.3 minutes), not to mention a flight of girlish overtones all the way to a giddy 3.7 minutes.

Of course none of these planetary chimes can be heard by naked ears in their original slow frequency, since they are about twenty octaves lower in pitch than the tones we know and therefore, unless transposed, resemble silent periodic earthquakes.

Out beyond the earth and moon a different and even more majestic kind of music is played by gravity and is known to astronomers as interplanetary harmonics, also smaller resonances such as perturbations between the moons and rings of Saturn and newer-discovered relations involving scores of asteroids.

Now if the song of a planet is pitched twenty octaves below man's hearing, the song of the atom is sung a complementary twenty octaves above it, leaving us musically midway between the trebles and basses of the micro- and macro-cosmic worlds. This to me is one of the most significant symmetries in nature.

Excerpt From: Guy Murchie. “The Seven Mysteries of Life.”