People in General – Piglet (2019)

Space is pretty weird when you think about it. Outside our atmosphere there’s pretty much a void – a big old place, filled with absolutely nothing. But if there is literally nothing there, how can space be there? What is it? And why is there so much of it? (The vast majority of the volume of the universe is space.) It’s all deeply troubling, if you let it be so.

And in space, they say, no one can hear you scream. They would be right. No one can hear anything. Not two planets crashing into each other; not Elon Musk smashing his windows with his big science balls; and not sweet sweet music, however banging it is.

Let’s be frank: sound is just vibrations, which means something needs to wibble about so they can move and get heard. Empty space does not wibble. It is the stubborn epitome of non-wibbling.

What’s true for sound is true for music. As we were all taught at an early age, music is sexy ripples of sonic data for our ears and brains to decode (and if we’re lucky enough, translate into highly profitable dance capital). Space kills music. Cuts it off at source. Think about that for a minute. A universe of silence.

Yet here we are. On reflection, we should feel massively fortunate to experience the phenomenon of sound at all – something that’s simply not possible virtually anywhere else in existence. If that’s not the ultimate reason to listen to some man-it-feels-great-to-be-not-stuck-in-space-and-deaf music immediately (e.g. People in General), I’d like to know what is.