EXPERIMENTAL STATIONS

It was once again in the hallowed halls of Bell Laboratories that the field of radio astronomy was born. Karl Jansky first detected radio waves emanating from the Milky Way in August of 1931. His discovery was a happy accident, one of those serendipitous coincidences born out of pure research and playful investigation. Yet Jansky had been around radio and playing with radio long before he showed up at Bell.

Born in what was then still the Territory of Oklahoma, his father Cyril M. Jansky was the dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Oklahoma. Cyril was passionate about physics, and named his son after Dr. Karl Eugen Guthe, a physicist and professor at the University of Michigan who’d been a mentor to Cyril. Cyril had been born of Czech immigrants in Wisconsin, and later returned to his home state where he retired as a professor of Electrical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin.

Karl had a brother ten years older, Cyril Jr., a man who helped lift the United States into the radio age by helping to build some of the earliest transmitters in the country. His handiwork was on the early radio stations 9XM in Wisconsin and the 9XI in neighboring Minnesota, now stations WHA and KUOM respectively.

During WWI there had been a ban on civilian radio stations. In October of 1919 the ban was lifted and the Universities of Wisconsin and Minnesota applied for "War Department Training and Rehabilitation School" station licenses which they received. The “X” in both call signs designated them as experimental stations. The operation of 9XI was under the oversight of Cyril Jansky Jr. who was an electrical engineering professor at Minnesota.

In 1920 a one-kilowatt spark gap transmitter was installed at 9XI. Students used it to communicate with other amateur stations and university stations, such as their neighbors in Wisconsin where the set-up had also been overseen by Cyril Jr. As a service both stations provided weather forecast and market bulletins using Morse code. When the vacuum tube came along in 1921 they were able to start making audio broadcasts.

In the following years as the radio service became more codified, various types of licenses emerged with assigned wavelengths corresponding to whether the station provided entertainment or news and information. These changes were also reflected in the assigned call letters. The 9XI station had become WLB. The radio service was a major asset to the community when in 1922 a major snowstorm knocked out newswire services in the region. The Minneapolis Tribune asked the station's operators to help retrieve the day's news through a roundabout series of amateur radio relays, one station passing the news on to the next until it reached its destination. This type of radio relaying became a major tradition for ham radio operators. In the United States, the American Radio Relay League, the major organization and advocate for US hams, takes its name from just that tradition.

Karl Jansky grew up in this milieu and it’s no wonder he followed in the family footsteps to also become a physicist and radio engineer. He was attending the University of Wisconsin during the years when it had changed from operating as 9XM to WHA and it is very likely he was familiar with the equipment being used at the station. He graduated in 1927 with his BS in physics.

SIGNALS IN THE STATIC

Janksy quickly landed a job at Bell Labs and relocated himself to their site in Holmdel, New Jersey. Of the many things Bell Labs was interested in was the investigation of the properties of the atmosphere and ionosphere with the shortwave of the radio spectrum for use in trans-Atlantic radio telephone service.

It was early days yet in the study of propagation, noise, and everything that could affect a signal being transmitted to a distant place. Jansky’s job was to listen to the static that interfered with communication; in studying it he found signals where others may have only heard noise.

In 1933, five years before Orson Wells historic War of the Worlds broadcast, Jansky was able to pinpoint “Electrical disturbances apparently of extraterrestrial origin.” This was in fact the name of the paper he wrote on his findings. It all started out with an antenna he built.

Radio astronomy is like fishing, only instead of a pole you have an antenna to reel in the catch of distant transmissions. To do his research on atmospheric noise Karl built an antenna that was dubbed “Jansky’s Merry-Go-Round.” Mounted on a “turntable” of four Model-T Ford tires it could be rotated to determine the strength or weakness of a signal and thereby pinpoint it. It was designed to receive radio waves at a frequency of 20.5 MHz (wavelength about 14.6 meters). Next to this antenna there was a small shack that housed equipment including an analog pen-and-paper recording system that plotted the findings of the antenna.
For several months he recorded signals from all different directions and eventually he was able to categorize them. Within the noise he was able to detect thunderstorms. Close thunderstorms exhibited one set of characteristics and those far away exhibited another. Then there was a third sound he picked up, a faint steady hiss whose origins were unknown. This signal had a location of maximum intensity, rising and falling every day.

Initially he thought the hiss was from solar radiation, but he revised this initial theory after further investigation. He discussed the anomalous hiss with his friend Albert Melvin Skellett, an astrophysicist who also worked at Bell and whom later wrote a paper on the “Ionizing Effect of Meteors” and whose name appeared on many patents. Skellet looked at the data and noted that the time between the signal peaks was on an exact cycle: it restarted every 23 hours and 56 minutes. This time frame is a sidereal day, a time scale used by astronomers based on the rate of Earth’s rotation relative to the fixed stars. Armed with this knowledge he compared his observations with optical astronomy maps. He noted that the signal peaked when his antenna was pointed to the densest region of the Milky Way galaxy, in the Sagittarius constellation. Knowing that the sun was not a huge source of radio noise, he concluded that the cosmic hiss was being created by “gas and dust” in that far corner of the galaxy.

Jansky wrote up his findings in a 1933 paper titled “Electrical disturbances of apparently extraterrestrial origin.” His findings were also publicized by a New York Times article on May 5th of that year. Jansky called the sounds from space “star noise” and it was something he wanted to investigate further but he found little help. Radio was a completely new tool when applied to astronomy, and the astronomers of the time on the one hand didn’t see the ramification of its many potential uses. In the 1930s and 40s they were also hampered by the financial constraints of the Great Depression and following that, the war effort.

Meanwhile those overseeing Jansky’s work at Bell Labs didn’t see the point in his further investigation of “star noise”. They were looking for solutions to the problems affecting trans-Atlantic communication and didn’t want to sink further funds into something they couldn’t be sure would prove useful to their goal.

 A small number of scientists and astronomers were interested in his research, but Jansky didn’t live long enough to see his contributions really take off. He died at age 44 in 1950 due to a heart condition. He was later honored by having his name appended to the unit used by radio astronomers for the strength (or flux density) of radio sources. Jansky noise was also named after him and refers to high frequency static disturbances originating deep within the cosmos. These are just a few of the ways his work has been remembered.

As for the emissions coming from the center of the Milky Way, in the 1950’s astronomers and astrophysicists thought it was made by electrons in a powerful magnetic field. Today the thinking is that the radio emissions are caused by ions in orbit around a Black Hole at the center of the galaxy called Sagittarius A*.  Jansky, having pointed his antenna towards galactic center, also pointed others towards the possibilities of a field combining radio and astronomy.  

THE HAM WHO MAPPED THE RADIO STARS

Grote Reber was an amateur radio operator (W9GFZ) and amateur astronomer who followed Jansky’s lead and combined his two hobbies to make great discoveries about the cosmos we inhabit. Having heard of Jansky’s work he applied for a job at Bell Labs because he realized this new field was the one for him but the Depression still had the countries resources drained and they didn’t have anything for him. So without waiting for grants or asking anyone else’s permission he built a parabolic receiving dish in his backyard in Wheaton, Illinois, and set out to do the work on his own.

The antenna or radio telescope he built was more advanced than even what Jansky had built with the funds from Bell Labs. It was made of sheet metal and shaped into a nine meter in diameter parabolic dish focused to a receiver eight meters above the dish, all connected to his radio gear. It was on a stand that could be tilted to various parts of the sky, but unlike Jansky’s it wasn’t on a turntable. Perhaps he should have hit up Ford for some spare tires. Reber completed his build in September 1937, and was able to keep radio astronomy alive during those fraught and lean years.

 It took Reber three attempts before he detected a signal which confirmed the discovery of Jansky. The first time he was looking on the 3300 MHz frequency, and the second time at 900 MHz. Finally in 1938 he was successful in detecting signals from outer space on 160 MHz. In 1940 he made his first professional publication in the Astrophysical Journal and was contacted by Yerkes Observatory who offered him a position. He turned them down and kept walking his own path. He decided to make a radiofrequency sky map and was the first to do so. This was published in 1941 and expanded in 1943.

Reber continued to trawl the megahertz fishing for signals from the stars and he hauled in quite a catch. He researched, wrote, published, rinsed and repeated, the lone radio astronomer. Yet the body of work he created in the new field became a big bang for radio astronomy that exploded after WWII. A lot of the folks getting out of the service had been trained in radio, radar, and electronic communications in one way or the other, and many of these folks went on to pursue careers in some aspect of electronics. Some of them came home and built on the foundation of radio astronomy whose waters were first explored by Jansky and Reber.
  
Reber continued his quest to explore the mysteries of the stars and the spectrum. One mystery he tinkered with had to do with a standard theory surrounding radio emissions from beyond Earth which claimed they were caused by black-body radiation, or the thermal electromagnetic radiation, including light (of which radio is an invisible form), given off by all hot bodies. According to this line of thinking scientists of the time expected there to be a greater quantity of high-energy light than low-energy due to stars and other hot bodies in the cosmos. Reber dispelled this notion by showing that there was a vast amount of low-energy radio signals able to be detected with his radio telescope system. Later in the 1950s the idea of synchrotron radiation was used as an explanation for his mysterious measurements.

Reber was a man who liked to go his own way. As the field of radio astronomy grew some areas of research were growing crowded, so he decided to study a band of frequencies that weren’t getting much attention. He looked at the medium frequency range of signals around the AM broadcast band, those in the 0.5–3 MHz range. All those frequencies below 30 MHz bounce off the ionosphere, part of the reason they are able to be picked up in distant locations. To really listen for distant signals coming in from outside he needed to go somewhere that let those signals in.

He found such a place in Tasmania, where he moved after a brief stint surfing the spectrum in Hawaii, when he received some funding from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. There in the southernmost state of Australia in the southern hemisphere, on the long winter nights when the sun barely shows his face, the pesky layer reflecting the radiowaves would go de-ionize, allowing the long waves from the stars to be caught by his radio telescope. Tasmania was also low in manmade electrical interference and RF. This allowed his equipment to receive like a dream and detect faint signals that elsewhere might have been obscured by noise.

Just as hams and shortwave listeners go to quiet out of the way spots that have low levels of manmade RF for DXpeditions, Reber’s love of radio and astronomy took him to exotic places, all in the continuing search for the ultimate DX signals –those trans-plutonian transmissions  from outside of our solar system, and perhaps even galaxy.
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For the rest of his career and life Reber lived in Tasmania searching for signals from the stars.

RADARS PUZZLING EVIDENCE

​During the war years there were some other explorations of radio astronomy happening below the radar, often being worked on by people involved in the field of radar. Radar had been shown to be a possibility for detecting objects as far back as Heinrich Hertz in 1886 when he showed that radio waves could be reflected off objects. The Russian physicist Alexander Popov developed a device for detecting distant lightning strikes in 1895. Ten years later the German inventor Christian Hülsmeyer demonstrated the use of radio to detect the “presence of distant metallic objects”, specifically ships at sea in distant fog. It was an invention that would have many practical uses. Many other radio experiments in direction finding and detection took place after this by excited investigators. 


During WWII several nations were working on the problem of radar independently though not yet called as such as part of their search for tools and effective strategies against their enemies. James Stanley Hey was a British physicist who joined the Army Operational Research Group (AORG) after a 6-week course at the Army Radio School to support his country during the fight against the Axis powers. 

Hey was tasked with one of those great traditions in radio: jamming, or rather ant-jamming in his case. Radio jamming is the intentional blocking or disrupting of a radio signal, often with another stronger interfering signal and is distinguished from natural sources of interference, and unintentional interference. It really got going as a method of miscommunication in WWII. Ground operators realized they could mislead the pilots of opposing forces by speaking in their language and leading them off in the wrong direction. Radar jamming uses the same principle, but the jammer sends out RF signals designed to interfere with those of other radar operators, saturating the enemy receiver with noise. Claude Shannon might have looked at it in terms of information theory: by increasing the noise in a system, the user has to work harder to lock on to a true signal. Jamming has also been extensively used in broadcast radio by oppressive regimes who don’t want the shortwave transmissions of other countries, such as when the United State’s station the Voice of America was jammed by the Soviet Union to stop their citizens from being able to listen. Broadcast jamming continues at the time of this writing in countries such as North Korea and China who want to keep outside transmissions, and outside messages, from entering their country.

Hey tackled the problem of German radar jamming and it led to discoveries relevant to radio astronomy. The Germans had been clever in their jams of Allied radar signals, leading to the escape of three German warships from the English Channel. Their signals had come off the French coast and interfered with those of the Allies. In February of 1942 Hey received reports of anti-aircraft radars being jammed in the 4-8 meter range of the spectrum. He found that the direction of maximum interference seemed to follow the path of the Sun. Following this lead he contacted the Royal Observatory and learned there was a very active sunspot. This led him to conclude that sunspots, which were already believed to emit streams of ions and electrons in magnetic fields of approximately 100 gauss, could also emit radio wave emissions in the meter-wavelength bands. After the war Hey continued his research in radio astronomy, working for the Royal Radar Establishment at Malvern.

Around the same time G. C. Southworth of the United States also found radio noise associated with the Sun in the centimeter portion of the spectrum. Southworth was a radio engineer who worked for AT&T starting in 1923 and eventually finished his tenure with them at Bell Labs where he retired in 1955. He is mostly remembered for his development of waveguides, but he was interested in all different aspects of radio and worked on other things such as ultrashort waves, the dielectric properties of water at ultrahigh frequencies, shortwave propagation, antenna arrays, earth currents, and radio astronomy. In 1950 he published his 675-page doorstopper of a tome, Principles and Applications of Waveguide Transmission. It was his nitty-gritty exploration of microwave techniques and it was while studying that range of the spectrum that he stumbled across signals from the sun.  

Back in England, J.A. Ratcliffe was another man working on the radar problem during the war years who encountered emissions from the sun. After graduating from Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge in natural sciences in 1924 he started researching propagation under Edward Victor Appleton, a pioneer of radiophysics. Appleton was an assistant demonstrator in experimental physics at the Cavendish Laboratory, part of the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge. Under Appleton’s tutelage Ratcliffe and M. A. F. Barnett figured out ways to understand the mystery of ‘fading’ radio signals. They investigated why transmissions faded from fixed stations that often happens at sunset. A few years later Ratcliffe became the head of a group at Cavendish whose purpose was to study how radio waves get reflected off the ionized layer in the upper atmosphere and the nature of that layer of atmosphere.

As part of Britain’s defense and signals intelligence they had built a network of anti-aircraft radar stations known as Chain Home that covered the eastern and southern coasts of the country. Various physicists and scientific types were assigned to spend a month at these stations. Ratcliffe was sent to one of these near Dover. Next he was made part of the Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE) who sent him to work at a Chain Home Low site. The “Low” sites were designated as such to detect planes flying below the altitudes the regular Chain Home stations were able to pick up. This work took him all around to various sites during the war.
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As the bitter years of war ended Ratcliffe was able to go back to Cavendish. The group had grown, and others soon joined in, including Martin Ryle from the TRE. Ryle ended up forming a section devoted to radio astronomy. Ryle and his colleagues developed further techniques for radio astronomy. The group went on to found the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory in the 1950s. 

Soon the techniques of interferometry were added into the mix. Optical interferometry had been used already by astronomers to get the resolution of a large telescope when using multiple smaller telescopes. The electromagnetic radiation collected at each of a number of separate small telescopes is combined to re-create the image that would have been obtained with the large telescope. This process is called “aperture synthesis”. The same principle can be used for any kind of wave be it light, sound or radio.

The first radio interferometer used for astronomical observation happened in Australia in 1946 by Jospeh Lade Pawsey, Ruby Payne-Scott and Lindsay McCready who used a single converted broadside array radar antenna at 200 MHz near Sydney. They had the idea to use radio waves reflected off the sea to produce an interference pattern. This specific technique became known as sea or sea-cliff interferometry. A radio detecting antenna was placed on top of a cliff to detect electromagnetic waves coming directly from the source and waves reflected off the surface of the water.  The two sets of waves are combined to create an interference pattern such as that produced by two separate antennas.

Numerous radar users in WWII had noticed “interference fringes” or the way radar radiation returned and reflected off the sea from incoming aircraft. They exploited this to observe the sun at dawn with interference arising from its reflections off the ocean. Using a baseline of 200 meters they determined that solar radiation during a burst phase was much smaller than the solar disk itself and came from a region known to be associated with a large grouping of sunspots. From this work the group was able to lay out the principles of aperture synthesis and published their results in a 1947 paper. 

A typical radio interferometry set up involves two or more separate antennas receiving radio waves from the same astronomical object and are joined to the same receiver. The antennas can be close together or spread very far apart. A variable delay device is used to compensate for the different times the waves come into the antennas. Another way interference patterns are created is by spacing the antennas in an attempt to make the waves interfere. The distance between them for interference depends on the wavelength and on the diameter of the source of the waves. 

Back in Cambridge Martin Ryle was also working on radio interferometry. With Antony Hewish and others in the Cavendish group he developed the technique of Earth-rotation aperture synthesis at radio wavelengths. He and Hewish received a Nobel prize for this work and their other contributions to the field.

Later in the 60s and 70s computers became part of the equation and their number crunching power was applied to some of the complex math, often involving Fourier transformations, used in radio astronomy.

All of this research branched out into observing a plethora of celestial radio sources. New discoveries were made adding to humanities cosmological knowledge. Specifically a number of new classes of objects unobservable by optical telescopes including pulsars, quasars and radio galaxies were received out of the aether enabling astrophysicists, cosmologists, and others of their ilk to refine their knowledge. The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation was first detected using radio astronomy. 
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Meanwhile further developments in radar allowed it to be used to map our neighboring planets, and the whole toolkit of radio astronomy has been used to study everything from space weather and further observations of the sun. All of this has been used as fuel for the imagination of a number of musicians who continue to hear the music of the spheres.

Read the rest of the Radiophonic Laboratory series.
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​Last month in the American Iconoclast / Great American Eccentrics series we looked at the work of Peace Pilgrim. This month we are going to listen to some stories with Ray Hicks, Bard of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

(If you are interested in the background of WHY I am writing these notes on American weirdos you can read this post by John Michael Greer on Johnny Appleseed's America.)

Respect is something I have for Ray Hicks, for the life he lived, the stories he told, the lives he touched. Lenard Ray Hicks August 29, 1922 – April 20, 2003) was a bard without ever calling himself a bard. He lived on Beech Mountain in North Carolina his whole entire life, knowing the land and its moods the way a long time married couple know each other. He was a storyteller, and a keeper of the Jack Tales, and these were his favorite to tell.

The most well known Jack tale is the one about when he goes and sells a cow to buy some magic beans. Instead of ending up in the poor house Jack climbs a huge beanstalk and comes face to face with a giant in the clouds. There are many more of these Jack tales besides the beanstalk story: Jack Frost, Jack the Giant Killer, Little Jack Horner, and This is the House that Jack Built just to a name a few. The stories are of Cornish and English progeny and were passed down as fairy tales, nursery rhymes, legends of the olden times. 

Now Ray Hicks family had come to America in the 1700s and his great-grandfather on his mothers side was Council Harmon  (1803-1896). Harmon's grandfather Cutliff Harmon (1748-1838) was believed to have brought the Jack tales to America when he came to settle. They found themselves in North Carolina, living deep in the hills where these stories, alongside the skills of instrument building (banjos, dulcimers' and more), distilling, foraging for food and medicine, were passed on from one generation to another. Ray grew hearing the stories and hearing the songs. The Harmon-Hicks family was  also known for having a unique knowledge of old British ballads. 

Living on the mountain, working on the land, knowing how to read the weather, knowing what tubers to eat when he was watching the cows up in the grazing patch, not even age ten. Hearing the stories whisper themselves to him as if by a wind on the mountain, seeing the hex signs his ma had painted on either side of the front door on the porch ceiling to keep out the ghosties, the knowledge percolated inside of him.

Sometimes when he was out on the land, tending to things, working alone, Ray would pull out his  Franch harp from the front pocket of his overalls and start to play. Sometimes the birds would come and listen. Perhaps because Jack still a harp, and Ray was a kind of Jack himself, he was skilled at playing the French harp -the Harmon-ica. 

Ray was experienced with old time ways of healing. A Granny Woman often came to the family when someone was sick or injured and to help deliver babies. She once saved Rays leg when it had been hit with a slop bucket thrown at him by his sister, after he stole some precious cake she was baking for her honey. The Granny Woman applied a poultice of wheat flour to his injury and it healed him. Later Ray became famous as being able to get rid of people's warts. People would even send him letters asking for help getting rid of their warts. He knew the formula and was able to do this even if they weren't sitting their together on his front porch for a spell.

Ray was a tall man, standing nearly seven feet. Perhaps some of the blood from the many encounters Jack had with giant folk had spilled into him. 

When he spoke, he spoke as if from out of time. His peculiar dialect was a bit strange even for other Appalachian's. The Hicks and Harmon families had preserved in their speech many old English terms, some that had last seen regular use in the 15th century. He learned his stories the way other storyteller's do, by listening, copying and then developing the mastery to spin a yarn.

"I wasn’t teached. That’s the way I growed up a-talking. I learned my Jack tales mostly from my dad’s father, John Benjamin Hicks. My grandmother Julie told Indian, witch and haint tales, too. I’d set and pick the burrs out of the hanks as she spun, and listen. They were both well in speech.”


The Jack tales had changed somewhat after coming to America, just as the Ballads had. In the Appalachian versions the tale would often feature a sheriff in place of a king or nobleman. 
To make his way in the world Ray worked as a farmer and mechanic. He kept to the ways of collecting herbs and plants, such as ginseng and many others, as way to make living. 

The first time he told stories in public was in 1951. He'd been invited to speak to a classroom of students at an elementary school. Since that time his reknown as a teller of tales started to spread.

Ray married Rosa Violet Harmon, who had also grown up on Beech Mountain. They had five kids together and raised them in the same cabin he had grown up in. 
He said his family was a family of talkers and that sometimes they talked just to try and out talk each other. Because talk was entertainment and that's what people did when they got together. Talked, sang, broke bread and talked some more. 

In 1973 he was invited to perform at first National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee. He was invited back many many times. This festival is considered to be a major point in the revival of storytelling, and the festival is still a going concern. It's very fitting Ray would have told his tales there in their first year. 

Folk musician David Holt, who considered Ray to be one of his mentors said of him, " He was what we call an all day talker. He would start talking the minute you got there…start right in on a story. He had the most amazing accent, kinda talked way back in his throat. He’d say, “Jack seen a man comin down out of the woods with a great big head and he was knocking big trees down and hittin big rock boulders and wasn’t even hurtin’ a hair in his own head… he said, ‘Hello there. Who are ye?’ ‘ My name is Hardy Hard Head.’ ‘Well Hardy hard Head you must be…into my ship.’ ” By the end of the day he’d still be talking, telling you the story. You’d get up and say, “Ray, it’s gettin late, gotta go.” He’d follow you all the way up to the car standing in the road still telling the tale. You’d just have to put down the window, wave and say, “Ray, I’ll see you..love you” and drive off with him still standing there still telling the story in the middle of the dirt road."

Ray learned not to plan out his tale telling in advance. He called his style of story improvisation "unthoughted". “I learnt not to plan my stories. That’ll ruint you. I just tell the one that hits my mind when I hit the mic.” 

In 1983 Ray was named a heritage fellow through the National Endowment for the Arts. He had to be dragged to Washington to receive the award from then vice-prez George Bush. And while he was unimpressed with the fast city ways of the nations capital, it was the one of many honors and awards given to him over the course of the rest of his life. 
As Ray became famous for his gifts at telling tales, he turned down a lot of opportunities to be on TV shows and the like because he never wanted to travel farther from his home than it would take to get back the same day. He was so dedicated to his place in the world that he said no to these requests. Instead he often spoke to schools in the surrounding area. He also didn't go around talking about his ability. He had a humility about him that made it to where even some of his neighbors on the mountain and around the area didn't know the treasure they had living so close to home.

His home was important to him. It had been built in 1912 by his grandpa and with help from the extended family. He lived in it his whole life. Ray felt weird and odd when he went further afield. 

Hicks died of prostate cancer at the age of 80 in 2003 and his wife followed him into the silent clearing of the woods in 2014. 

There are many other great videos of Ray on youtube, including an hour long documentary called "Last of the Old Time Storytellers". 

The biography of him by Lynn Salsi “The Life and Times of Ray Hicks: Keeper of the Jack Tales” is a great book for those who went to dig further. In a way it is really his autobiography. It’s his words that she recorded and collected over many years and then edited into cohesive life story. Reading it you feel like you are sitting with him and his family for a spell on his cabin porch underneath the hex sign painted there by his mother to keep out the ghosties, privileged to be listening to him tell his tale. It’s a true bardic transmission.

Other re/sources: 
https://www.rayhicks.com/
https://www.davidholt.com/mentors/ray-hicks/
​https://wncmagazine.com/feature/giant_storyteller

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​The ancient philosophers and mystics of this world proposed the theory of the five elements and this theory is still seen at play, though transformed, in the science of the present day. From air, fire, water and earth we have gases, energy and heat, liquids and matter. The fifth element is the aether, the quintessence crowning the four other elements. And though science seems to have discarded the aether it is yet everywhere around us.

The early Ionian cosmologists thought there was an infinite and unbegotten divine substance, neither created nor ever to be destroyed, permeating the entire universe. Empedocles used the term elements and roots interchangeably, and the four classical elements had their roots in the divine everlasting substance. Combined in various ratios these four elements make up the physical universe.

Later Plato writing Timaeus of the air element said "there is the most translucent kind which is called by the name of aether.” His student Aristotle continued to explore the four elements, and introduced the fifth element in his book On the Heavens. Aristotle posited that there was another element located in the heavenly and celestial realm of the stars and planets. Aristotle considered this new element to be the first element, in that the other four elements had their origin and root in it. In his book he did not give it a name, but later writers commenting on his work started referring to this element as the aether, or fifth element.

The heavenly element of the aether was not the same as the four terrestrial elements. Aristotle held that it could not move outside of the natural circles made by the stars in their spheres. He related this idea of aethereal spheres to his observation of the planets and stars in their perfect orbits.  The scholastic philosophers of the medieval era thought that the aether might change and fluctuate in density, as they reasoned the planets and stars were denser than the universal substance permeating the universe.
The theory of the five elements continued to spread throughout medieval times, transmitted and passed in particular among the alchemists who embraced the idea as part of their secret lore. The Latin name for the fifth element was the quintessence and this word can be found throughout the many alchemical treatises penned over the centuries. The idea of the quintessence became especially popular among the medical alchemists for whom aetheric forces became part of healing substances and elixirs.

Robert Fludd, the great 17th century hermetic philosopher, Rosicrucian, natural magician and follower of Paracelsus, claimed that the nature of the aether was “subtler than light”. In this he started to point to later ideas of the aether as a kind of catch all for a variety of electromagnetic phenomena. Fludd cited the view of Plotinus from the 3rd century who thought the aether was non-material and interpenetrated the entire universe of manifest reality and its various forms.

Isaac Newton, himself a devoted alchemist, used the idea of the aether as a way to explain his observations of the strict mechanical rules he was writing about in his works on physics. In turn the physicists of the 18th century developed a number of models for various physical phenomena that came to be known as aether theories, used to explain how gravitational forces worked and how electromagnetic forces propagated.

19th century scientist and successful business magnate Baron Dr. Carl von Reichenbach took up the study of the field of psychology in 1839 after making important discoveries in the fields of geology, chemistry, and metallurgy. If it hadn’t been for Reichenbach’s research in the physical sciences and his study of the properties of coal we wouldn’t have creosote, paraffin, or phenol which he developed the process for extracting. When he set out to tackle the field of psychology after striking it rich from his many patents and factories he discovered that people he termed “sensitives” were able to pick up on things the rest of us couldn’t. This often led the sensitive person to develop emotional and mental problems. But he also noticed these sensitives could sometimes see a force field around such things as a magnet.

This led Reichenbach to the works of Franz Anton Mesmer who had already been deemed a heretic by people like Benjamin Franklin and other members of the scientific establishment of the time. What Mesmer called Animal Magnetism, Reichenbach called Odic Force. Reichenbach was in turn denounced for his studies of this force which he observed as behaving in ways similar to yet distinct from magnetism, electricity, and heat. He wouldn’t be the last to be called a crank and a catamount for his investigation of the life force.

The two terms of Animal Magnetism and Odic Force would both have been recognized by metaphysicians, occultists and philosophers as the aether.

By the time Albert Einstein had introduced special relativity the aether theories used by physicists wer discarded among the scientific intelligentsia of the time. Einstein had shown that Maxwell’s equations, which form the mathematical foundation for form the foundation of classical electromagnetism, classical optics, and electric circuits, did not need the idea of the aether for the transmission of these forces. Yet even Einstein admitted that his own theory could be thought of as an aether theory because it seemed to show that there were physical properties in the seemingly empty space between objects.

As the 20th century rolled on the idea of the aether continued to be propagated among theosophists, adherents of the new thought movement, and various other occultists. In 1907 the French philosopher Henri Bergson spoke of the Élan vital in his book Creative Evolution. Bergson used this concept as an explanation for evolution and development of organisms, which he linked closely with consciousness.

Psychologist Wilhelm Reich made his own discovery of the life force in the 1930s, which he called orgone. As a direct student of Freud, his concept of orgone was the result of work on the psycho-physiology of libido, of which he took an increasingly bio-energetic view. After Reich emigrated to the United States his attention increasingly turned to speculation about the nature of the universe, and ideas about biological development and evolution, even the weather. Reich was more at home in the mode of “natural philosopher” or “natural scientist” than in the ideologically strict compartmentalization that had occurred in the field of psychology.

Despite his documentation of the successful effects of orgone therapy, and his devices such as the orgone accumulator and cloud buster, Reich remained a heretic among doctors and scientists.  He lost his teaching position at the New School in 1941 after telling the director he had saved several lives using orgone therapy. Due to his associations as a socialist he was arrested by the FBI after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He continued to be persecuted throughout the 1950s. It’s an interesting story and too long to tell in detail for the present purposes, but suffice it to say through various injunctions the FDA destroyed his orgone accumulators and later burned six tons of his journals, books, and papers.

Then he was thrown in jail where he died. All because he was audacious enough to believe in, study, and experiment with the life force, what he called orgone, and what the ancients have called aether.

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Those who haven’t been afraid to stand on the fringe and hang out in the margins, have continued to research and investigate the nature of the aether and various means for utilizing it.  There is a lot of work and experimentation to be done, and the relationship between musical healing modalities, electronics and the aether promises to be an area full of vitality.

As a wellspring of creativity the aether continues to inspire musicians and composers. Robert Ashley asked the question “Will something of substance replace the Aether? Not soon. All the parts are in disarray.”

Ashley also said “Aether fills the void, as in not knowing when you might get a chance to hear somebody make music, or where is the nearest town where something might be going on… or whether you got the idea that wakes you up at night from the hard-to-hear part of what comes over the radio, or from something you read about in a magazine about electricity, or from something you just dreamed up.”

Artists, writers and musicians such as him have continued to think of the aether and tap into it as a prime source. The music of the spheres continues to inspire those of us down here on earth who do their best to translate it into new compositions. Musicians continue to look up to the stars as a source of creativity. They take that aetheric light from the stars into themselves to create new works that show our relationship with the rest of the cosmos.
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Where do ideas come from? Transmitted over the aether they spill into the head of the artist, who is the vessel. They give voice to the aether. With the tools of radio, telecommunications, images and data from satellites and the sonic possibilities opened up by electricity, they have a lot of rich source material to translate the voice into compositions. This chapter explores some of these works inspired by the celestial realms. ​

Is the universe itself oscillating just like the radio waves that travel throughout it? Does the universe grow and expand out of a Big Bang and crest into a large wave before collapsing back in on itself again into a Big Crunch, and out of that singularity is another universe created out of the Big Bang?  In 1930 Albert Einstein briefly theorized just such an oscillating universe.  As more and more black holes form over the passage of time in the expansion phase, their combined gravitational attraction eventually draws more and more matter into their orbits ending with another Big Crunch. In this cyclical theory an eternal series of oscillations means all possible forms of the physical universe, and all possible histories of earth would have a chance to play out with each new Big Bang, with each oscillating iteration.

Richard C. Tolman, a mathematician and physicist, was quick to point out though, how entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, was prohibitive of this cyclical theory. Entropy can only increase inside of a system, and this implied that successive cycles would grow larger and longer. Inevitable thermodynamic heat death was the only possibility according to Tolma. Meanwhile, tracing the same trend backwards in time the cycles before our present one would thus each have been shorter and smaller, culminating in the kickoff event of the Big Bang.

Yet the cyclical theory of an oscillating universe has much to lend itself. It fits neatly into spiritual ideas on the nature of cycles of time. As such it has been adopted by poets, artists and musicians, and new generations of scientist continue to try and find ways to make the theory work with the benefit of newer models, notions, and research.
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This idea of an expanding and contracting universe oscillating between Big Bang and Big Crunch was one of the notions running through Stockhausen’s mind when he came to compose his ensemble piece Ylem in 1972. 

The title of the piece, itself a strange, alien sounding word, has a strange story. Ylem was resurrected from Middle English by cosmologist Ralph Alpher, a student of George Gamow, a Russian American physicist and cosmologist who was an early advocate of the Big Bang theory. Alpher had stumbled across the entry for Ylem in Webster’s second dictionary where it was defined as being “the first substance from which the elements were supposed to have been formed.” It had gotten to Middle English by way of the Latin hylen, or hylem which had in turn came from the Greek ὕλη (hūlē, hȳlē) for "matter". In ancient times this primordial matter was conceived of as the cosmic egg, from which the universe itself was hatched.

The cosmologists and physicists of the 1930’s had re-adopted the ancient conception, and with the rediscovery of the word ylem, tied it back to the insights of the world’s elder philosophies.
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Gamow and his colleagues posited that the ylem is what existed immediately after the Big Bang. They assumed that within this primordial substance were a large number of high-energy photons. In 1948 Alpher and scientist Robert Herman predicted that these red-shifted photons should still be able to be observed as an ambient cosmic microwave background radiation, or CMBR.  Alpher and Herman thought the CMBR would pervade all of space at a temperature of 5 kelvins. In 1965 when CMBR was first detected the researchers found it to be not far off their predicted mark, at 3 kelvins.

Stockhausen played with these ideas in his composition, and used them to show musically the expansion and contraction of an oscillating universe. In the program notes for a performance that occurred on  August 25, 1992 he wrote, “There is a theory about an oscillating universe in which we live: Every 80 billion years the universe explodes, pulls itself back together and then explodes a second time – thus ‘oscillating universe’. The original explosion, or also the primary material, is called ‘Ylem’. All the material that exists originated from a primary material, then expands, the expansion slows down, and then through increasing acceleration everything in the universe melts in fire and becomes the basic substance hydrogen, and then explodes again...

     I cordially request that you pay attention to this expansion: how every instrumentalist gradually expands his tone-space and forms the individual tones more and more, so that every tone-space receives a new shape. Very much depends on the inventiveness of each individual musician: how he shapes the tones, how he distributes them within the deceleration and subsequently again during the acceleration. Let the whole have an effect on you, not just by the details.”
           
The instructions for Ylem are notated verbally. This imaginative piece would require the players to be familiar with Stockhausen’s aleatory and intuitive music practices. The conception is simple but the execution demanding. Ylem was written for a total of nineteen players, including four electric instruments who also use shortwave radios, five stationary instruments, and ten instrumentalists who are mobile, playing throughout the performance space. In the 1973 premiere the instruments consisted of electronium (accordion-synth), synthesizer, electronically-processed saxophone, electronically-processed cello, electric organ, piano, harp, cello, tam-tam (gong)/vibraphone, flute, oboe, English horn, clarinet, bass clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone, violin alongside the four shortwave radios.

At the beginning ten of the mobile performers stand close to one of the stationary instruments who creates an initial explosion of sound. These ten players then expand, moving throughout the hall or performance space, taking up positions around the audience as a galaxy of musical points. As they move in space, they also move in sound. They move away from the starting pitch determined by the initial musical Big Bang explosion, and the sounds are slowly attenuated.

This part of the performance takes about ten to twelve minutes, and just as the sounds move away from their initial starting pitches the volume and intensity of the musical attacks also starts to diminish as this universe of musicians reaches its point of greatest expansion.  After a few minutes shortwave radio comes in briefly. At the same time short melodic groups start to form that become varied with an increase of glissando and trills. At this maximum point the players start chanting the word “Hu!”, an important seed syllable from Stockhausen’s work Inori. As the seed syllable is chanted the shortwave radio players start tuning across the bands again, in search of transmissions from the aether.
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From this expansion point the musicians start to return to their starting point, pulled back in for the Big Crunch by gravitationally dense musicianship. Once they are all back in a second Big Bang or musical explosion occurs. The nine-fixed players at this point switch to portable instruments and join the mobile players from the first phase dispersing gradually out through the hall and then eventually out of the building all together as they continue to play. The recordings I’ve heard are reminiscent of some of the wild swing of Sun Ra and his Arkestra, and just as cosmic. It’s in a mode that is as close to free jazz as it is to intuitive free form classical music.

For this work much is also required of the conductor. He or she must maintain extreme concentration even though he is not outwardly active. He must act as a medium between the musicians who have been instructed to maintain telepathic contact with each other. In his score the maestro writes, "YLEM is music which best succeeds when the players establish telepathic communication with one another (they play with eyes closed) and with a ‘conductor’ who listens with extreme concentration from the middle of the hall, but is not outwardly active." Perhaps the medium by which this telepathic communion is achieved is the aether or ylem itself, as mysterious and magical as the electromagnetic waves which permeate the universe.

The word Hu came from Stockhausen’s reading of The Sufi Message by Hazrat Inayat Khan where he writes:

“HU is the most sacred of all sounds.
The sound HU is the beginning and end of all sounds, be they from man, bird, beast or thing.
The word HU is the hidden spirit in all sounds and words, just like the spirit in the the body.
HU belongs to no language, but every language belongs to it.
HU is the name of the Most High, the only true name of God; a name that no people and no religion can claim as its own.
HU means spirit – MAN or MANA means mind.
A HUMAN is a man conscious of God, realized in God.
Human (German) – Human (English) – Humain (French).
HU, God, is in all things and beings, but it is Man by whom HE is known”

Hu had played a large role in climax of the prayer gesture piece of Inori. Furthermore, before Stockhausen even wrote Ylem, he had experienced it in a musical vision. This was not at all unusual for him as many of his compositions came to him in dreams and visions.

 The composer writes, “Before I wrote the score I heard the following: A tone that was very strong and indescribably dense exploded.  With its particles, the tone gradually expanded to three octaves lower and higher in the tone-space. The distances between the individual tones became more and more irregular, and also their durations – separated by pauses – became more and more differentiated. I also heard different timbres. The whole process lasted for a relatively long time, and the distances between the tones became larger and larger. Finally, this event achieved the complete range from the highest to the lowest tone.
Then I heard the syllable HU shouted, and this music, which had become very thin in the meantime – but still consisted of all extremes of dynamics and many different pitches and timbres – gradually pulled back together until it finally, after a long time, became inextricably dense, and this dense state, which I cannot describe other than by calling it compact tone-material, then exploded again and everything moved up one tone.”

He related the experience to the theory of the oscillating universe.
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Perhaps the universe itself is a continuous infinite waveform. This idea has continued to be explored in different models by brane cosmologists Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok, and also in the Baum-Frampton model. As with many other cosmological models we know enough to know that we don’t know enough.
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As inspiration for music it works perfect and I could listen to the oscillating universe again and again and again.   

SOURCES:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ylem

The Cosmos--Voyage Through the Universe series, New York: 1988 Time-Life Books 

Oxford English Dictionary

Bernstein, Jeremy (1986). "Out of My Mind: The Birth of Modern Cosmology". The American Scholar. 5555 (1): 7–18

​https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ylem

R. C. Tolman (1987) [1934]. Relativity, Thermodynamics, and Cosmology. New York: Dover.

Essay and Analysis of Ylem by Ed Chang:
http://stockhausenspace.blogspot.com/2015/01/ylem.html

Ylem: Stockhausen Edition 21

http://www.stockhausen-verlag.com/DVD_Translations/YLEM_Introduction_Engl.pdf
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