XXXIV

Event Horizon originated as a term in Albert Einstein's Theory of General Relativity (1915). It defines the question: How would physical objects appear if they were to fall into a black hole? As gravity also affects time, the objects would appear to the observer to slow down infinitesimally. That things gravitate towards infinity is perhaps a fascinating reality even if we cannot observe anything falling into a black hole right now, because there isn't one within the earth's atmosphere. But it tells us something about our auditory perception. The range in which we perceive sound is between 20 and 20,000 vibrations per second. At the low-end we feel these and anything above about 10,000 is so high that most composers do not go there for the unpleasantness involved in actually listening to them, unless we count a hearing-test as some sort of composition. What would happen then if we find a black hole on this earth and listen for music being sucked into it, so to speak, because from our perspective it would just slow down and eventually stretch out to infinity if we were patient enough. To us, it would come to some kind of stand still, yet we are still moving, both on this earth and as inhabitants of spaceship earth, but so is the music of our experiment. This music is on the event horizon, at the borders of our perception, on the verge of perhaps a quantum mechanical time. This is a non-linear time, the object doesn't move, but we move around it by listening to it. So, no drum rolls, please, as causality is but a figment of our imagination. Our reality, in front of this black hole on earth, is much more complicated: time and space are one, as Einstein postulated with the term spacetime in his field equations. The geometric properties of gravity affect both space and time. Our perception of time is linked to our perception of space. This is the reason I cannot tell you how long you should listen to my opus 337, which is 3602 seconds long. It is, after all, part of a utopian science, the sounds and sights of the event horizon.

XXXIV