The Sounds of Science

What is it about classic rock that pairs so well with astronomy, planetary sciences, and all that heady racket? What Friday night laser show doesn't feature a little Pink Floyd, maybe some Zeppelin, and then fading into the master strains of Alice Cooper's "School's Out"?
People have always speculated about the future, cut open chickens, read tea leaves, shaken magic 8 balls, but it was always from the language of what we knew, be it guitars, tea, poultry. Somehow, as SF developed as a language for scrying, it grew increasingly interior.
In E.E. "Doc" Smith's Triplanetary, the future technology is envisioned as rays and dirigibles and yet undiscovered wavelengths displayed in a war field of unencumbered logic. Conway Costigan, our space hero, steps onto the page amid an orchestra gala, the full musical experience of the 40's.
Later, Rogery Zelazny, who imagines the controlled fantasies of a psychiatric machine that joins the consciousness of doctor and patient in the outstanding short story "He Who Shapes," is asked to write a story for Heavy Metal. (Check out his collection The Last Defender of Camelot which contains both stories.)
William Gibson imagines cyberspace, a fantastical world generated in the brains of computers. He's credited with leading the cyberpunk movement, which has a genre of music all its own.
Think of the Blade Runner soundtrack which marries a cyberpunk world, to a mystical, technical, electronic music.
Classic, heavy, space rock gives a naturalistic feeling of vastness with its huge reverb and delay; it gives the sense of raw electric power, not digital processing but electric force, at least the early tube stuff did with it's crackling transistors and amps pushed to the max. The old VOX amps didn't have distortion, you just turned them up until the sound wobbled then snapped like the back of a jet engine cracked wide open.
And electronica, especially world electronica and punk electrics of the 80's, was highly connected to the equipment, rather than a Macbook with an output, so that every artist had an organically unique electric sound. These sounds were large but the space was interior, generated not simply by the reverb splash of a crackly spring, but by the complexity of tone and the layering of waves.
So, what is the sound of our paradigm now? Is it the steady chug of indie rock that speaks to our visions and fantasies? Maybe its the disarming vulnerable volatility of the rising tides of folk, it's apparent lack of technology a rebellion in itself... or perhaps modern folk is even a more organic technology altogether of sensitive mics that underline and amplify even the tiniest flourish...
Perhaps it is the subtle attenuation that is the language of our time. Perhaps our visions of the future are not so vast right now, in this era of the grooming of the ego on Facebook, of media marketing, and personal presentation and branding. Why this focus on this interior? Perhaps the technological, cyber world has led us to introspection. Phillip Dick, author of the book that inspired Blade Runner, was always an introspective author, well ahead of the cyberpunk movement, so for his work to ascend to greater heights of popularity in the 80's fits in quite smoothly. Still, where does this cyber world focus our vision?
In the internet generation, there's that sense that the future is already here, hidden somewhere in a nook in a blog on the internet, something new, THE NEW, is out there waiting for you to type in the http. Maybe that's not so, maybe we've lost track of the vision of the future, not just to re-imagine what is already here but to speculate wildly that maybe it's far far beyond anything we've ever seen or heard before. Maybe the future is not, dare I say it, a coming singularity. Perhaps the future is not Chthulu slumbering in the depths of the internet waiting to be discovered, perhaps it is a black monolith floating in space, making it's silent way towards us, completely unannounced.