What would music sound like on Mars?
For as long as we’ve been dreaming about travelling through space, we’ve also been dreaming about the little red dot next door to us, Mars.
From HG Wells’ War of the Worlds, which envisions an invading force coming from the planet named after the Roman god of war, to Edgar Rice Burroughs’s writing of John Carter, a soldier transported to the mysterious red planet and given great powers, the medium most in thrall to the fourth rock from the Sun is music.
Not for nothing is one of the most celebrated openings in classical music, the Mars movement from Gustav Holst’s The Planets. Ever since then, David Bowie found Life there (possibly in the form of some spiders), Paul McCartney found a way of expressing the gender divide, Kelis started sending her lovers there, and Tim Wheeler even found a girl there.
So, with all that in mind, what would all that music actually sound like up there? The reason Mars has such a prime place in our future is because the atmosphere isn’t a million miles away from our own. In the not-as-distant-as-you’d-think future, we may have some of our Earth pop songs being played on its surface, so we might as well start imagining how it’ll sound and start planning our sound systems to match!
Now, time for the bar-mat science. On our home turf, we hear music due to vibrations travelling through the air, reaching our ears and stimulating our eardrums. So, our atmosphere, the air we breathe, is the conduit for all this. Now, the atmosphere on Mars is similar to ours, but there are three key differences that would affect the way we hear things. First of all, let’s look at the planet’s surface temperature.
Put simply, Mars is a whole lot colder than Earth, with an average surface temperature of -63°C. This means it takes fractionally longer for the air molecules on Mars to vibrate than they do on Earth, so the speed of sound would be slightly slower there. Nothing you’d notice in conversation, but the further away you are from someone, the more you’d notice. So, when we start holding concerts in the Newton Crater, there’ll have to be a few more speakers set out for those at the back than you’d see in Knebworth.
So, the air is colder than back home, and it’s a lot less dense by a matter of almost a hundred times. Put simply, there’s less air there for soundwaves to travel through, and because of that, everything will be a lot quieter than it is on Terra. Those speakers at the Newton Crater would have to be a lot bigger and a lot more powerful in order to work as effectively as they do on Earth. So, it’s just a case of turning it up, right? Well, not quite.
Nature abhors a vacuum, so while there’s a lot less air in the atmosphere on Mars, what takes its place is Carbon Dioxide. Loads of it. 96% of the atmosphere, to be precise. Carbon dioxide absorbs high-pitched sound frequencies, so if you’re trying to speak with a high-pitched voice or sing anything other than Joy Division songs, then you may be out of luck. So, until we change the atmosphere to be identical to ours, the concerts going on at our magnificent Newton Crater amphitheatre will be all dubstep, all the time. Can’t we just stay here?
