WHY HAVE A QSO WHEN YOU CAN HAVE A CONCERTO?

When the musician-composer duo of Brian Eno and Beatie Wolfe launched their new album, "Liminal," on the 10th of October, they really launched it, in every sense of the word. On Facebook, Brian Eno described the pair's musical partnership as [quote] "exploring an intimate and unfamiliar new sonic world" [endquote]. So what better venue for it than some far-away sonic world? The pair beamed the album into space via microwave transmission five days after its release. At the helm of Liminal's liftoff was Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Wilson operating the Holmdel Horn Antenna in New Jersey which had played a role in helping prove the Big Bang Theory.

The microwave horn antenna, as it turns out, is a well-tuned instrument of music as well as science. For Beatie Wolfe, this was actually its encore performance. Robert Wilson helped broadcast a previous album of hers in 2017, a work known as "Raw Space."

Music, the universal language, is now the universe's language. Even NASA has got into the act. In 2008 the space agency marked its 50th anniversary by sending a recording of the Beatles' "Across the Universe" into deep space. Last year its Deep Space Station 13 radio dish antenna in California beamed the first hip-hop song into space, Missy Elliott's "The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)."

This past May, the European Space Agency broadcast a Vienna Symphony Orchestra performance of Johann Strauss' "Blue Danube Waltz" from its radio antenna in Spain at the speed of light in the direction of the Voyager 1 probe.

This is the never-ending journey of music. It is now surrounded by constellations and CubeSats, dancing with the stars.