Science & Sound

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Discovery of modern science from planetary motions to chemistry and DNA structure - all apply the laws of harmony and musical proportions. The ideas for this paragraph are inspired by the book "NadaBrahma-The World is Sound" by Joachim-Ernst Berendt, 
I will mention this ideas, theories briefly here without the complicated scientific approach, but if you are interested to explore them further I refer you to this book.

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Lama Govinda's word as we will see has to be understood literally: "Each atom is constantly singing a song, and each moment this song create dense or fine forms of greater or lesser materiality." Lama Anagarika Govinda (1898–1985) was a German-born Buddhist thinker, writer, painter, and mystic who became one of the most influential Western interpreters of Tibetan Buddhism in the 20th century. This chapter is about to explore his saying, and bridge understanding of it through discovery of modern science. 

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Johannes Kepler was a German astronomer, who was also a musician. The most famous work of his works - "Harmonices mundi libri V" ("Five Books About World Harmony"), as if it were a piece of music which he had written about , and not the planets.

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Kepler was the first one to notice, that celestial bodies move in elliptic orbit, and not circular. According to Kepler, God caused the planets to leave initially inherent circular orbits and to adopt complicated elliptic orbits to produce even more beautiful sounds.  

What is remarkable is that the planets in our solar system from the unlimited possibilities of orbits - chosen that orbits which oscillate and sound in proportions prevalent in our "earthly music" 

 

Kepler indeed proved in his Third Law of Planetary Motion the concept of Music of the Spheres described by Pythagoras hundred years before him - the law which is still valuable is modern science today follows musical proportions. 

 

Willie Ruff and John Rodgers of Yale University programmed the angular velocities of the planets into a synthesiser.  They followed precisely to Kepler’s orbital data (not modern recordings of electromagnetic “sounds” from space, but the mathematical relationships of orbital speeds) and transformed orbital mechanics into audible frequencies. 

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The piece of music they produced is called The Harmony of the World: The Song of the Planets (1979) as a direct homage to Kepler’s Harmonices Mundi.

To nobody surprise , the sounds of the planet correspond to traditionally attributes qualities of this planets.  

Mercury - fast and relentless "The Messenger of Gods" . 

Mars, restless in its sharper intervals, pulses with urgency and heat.  Venus, by contrast, hardly shifts her pitch, holding a nearly perfect constancy that mirrors her ancient reputation for balance, beauty, and enduring love. The Earth, with her plaintive Mi–Fa–Mi, seems to sigh in the very syllables Kepler once heard - a song of struggle, but also of faith, carried faithfully through the seasons. Jupiter has a majestic sound similar to church organ, and Saturn produce deep-mysterious drone. 

The sound spectrum of the six visible planets including Earth covers eight octaves, almost identical with the human hearing range. You can listen to this song in the internet. 

 

After Kepler's death, three further planets (Uranus, Neptune, Pluto) were discovered, and of course their orbits also fit perfectly into Kepler's laws, corroborating them.  Since these planets have very low orbital velocities (Pluto's orbit around the sun, for example, takes 248 years), their transposition into sound would be below the human hearing capacity. The orbital ellipses of these outer planets, however, can be made audible to the human ear as rhythms, because rhythm have lower vibrations than tones. Ruff, who is not only a scientist but also a jazz musician, commented: "I knew there just had to be rhythm out there."

 

All this summarised: The six visible planets with their elliptical orbits form a "six-part harmony motet" (expression coined by Kepler) and the three outer planets add the "rhythm section" (in Ruff's words) in which Pluto, the most distant, beats the cosmic "bass drum". 

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Not long before cosmos was considered a silent place, but with discovery of radio telescope it was re-imagined. In their "Amateur Radio Astronomer's Notebook", Jeff Lichtman and Robert M.Sickels comment:
"By the science of radio telelscopy a whole new dimension of the universe is revealed. The edge of the galaxy becomes a noisy hissing cacaphony of sound, these sounds being produced by quick shifts in molecular and atomic energy levels in gases made hot by newly born stars. The giant planet Jupiter... produces its own peculiar noise. Huge rapid sighs like the intense roaring of a distant surf are triggered by Jovian electrical activity very much like the electrical storm on earth, although storms of such intensity as to be worthy of the god whose name the planet bears.
The Sun makes its noises too ... hisses and crackling sounds when it is in a condition of relative quietude ... and roars of alarming intensity when it becomes angry and spews giant portions of matter far out into space."

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The most interesting cosmic sound producers are pulsars, also referred to as pulsating stars or neutron stars. This tiny stars are born from the explosive of massive supernova star. The star’s core collapses into a neutron star, an ultra-dense object with a radius of only about 10–15 km but more mass than the Sun.

Some pulsars sound like slow bass kicks, others sound like snare rolls or buzzing hi-hats, but even a single pulsar can change it sound within one day or even with one hour - It’s like listening to a cosmic drum that sometimes improvises, sometimes glitches, sometimes roars louder than expected.
If you listen to a sound of Vela Pulsar - it sounds like a very steady techno beat.
The Crab Pulsar located in the constellation of Cassiopeia, 500 million light-years away - is so shrunken that it can hardly be seen by the strongest telescope, but it emits sound so strong that even the simple radio amateur gear can pick it up.

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Not long before cosmos was epithet for a silence. Now we now that cosmos is filled with sounds and rhythms from pulsars and quasars, from supernovas, red giants and white dwarfs and of course our Sun. Through this lenses the word cosmos regains it original Greek meaning of "adornment".
Long ago anyone who was speaking of "harmony of the spheres" like Plato in Timaeus, Pythagoras in the 6th century B.C.E and Johannes Kepler in 17th century could be understood metaphorically at best, but now we can see that their words have to be taken literally.

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As above, so below - and we explored the macrocosm already and let's see what happens in the micro-world of atoms and molecules.

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Again in "The World of Sound" - J-E Berendt, jazz-musican showing us the discovery made by two specialists almost simultaneously which complement each other: German musicologist Wilfried Krüger and French nuclear physicist Jean E. Charon.
Wilfried Krüger discovered striking analogies between the structure of crucial elements for life (like oxygen, carbon, phosphorus) and musical scales - demonstrating what he framed as "harmonic proportions."

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Take oxygen, the element of breath. With its eight protons and eight electrons, oxygen unfolds like the eight notes of a major scale. The spins of its particles indicate musical steps: a positive spin resonates as a whole tone, while a negative spin falls as a semitone. Moreover, the oxygen nucleus, modeled with 12 “steps,” mirrors the 12 intervals in Western music. Seven intervals are “filled” (like the diatonic scale's seven notes), and five are “empty,” akin to chromatic or modulation notes. 

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The same principle appears in carbon, the backbone of organic life. Its electron shell, when saturated per nuclear physics, yields the tones C‑D‑E‑F‑G‑A, mirroring the Gregorian hexachord. Notably, all three hexachords (durum, molle, naturale) appear depending on saturation state.
Even more expansive is phosphorus, the spark of DNA. With 15 protons, it forms a 15-step scale from G up to F′, again aligning negative spins with semitones.

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In the structure of DNA, phosphorus serves as the central axis of the molecule’s backbone. Surrounding each phosphorus atom are clusters of oxygen, and Krüger observed that their arrangement reflects the ancient Pythagorean Tetractys - the division of the octave into the intervals of fourth, fifth, and whole tone. Pythagoreans attributed magic power to Tetractys and called it sacred. And it's not only DNA, the same structure is almost ubiquitous in those mysterious processes where inorganic structures are transformed into organic life.

The Harmonic Principles also applied if we go further into microcosm, into domain of micro-particles and the most fascinating that the physicists are approaching now the mind and spirit from unexpected direction.

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Electrons interact with each other through their spins and by exchanging photons.
What are photons ? If electrons are particles which belong to "matter" carriers (fermions), then photons are "force" carriers. They don't have a mass and have a superposition in space, they like to act together (imagine how laser works - millions of photons collapse into the exact same energy state.) So photons belong to bosons family - the messengers of the universe.

Krüger gave the following answer about photons: "By establishing that time stands still, that 'place' is nowhere and everywhere, and that the mass of particle moving at the speed of light (such as photon) is equal to zero, nuclear physics approaches a threshold that mystics have approached, and still approach, from other direction."
J-E Berendt continues:
"It's 'place' is nowhere, its mass is equal to zero, it moves at the speed of light, and it is continuously active and effective - if one asked an unbiased person what 'it' is, one might get the answer: a thought."

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To understand interpretation of modern physics by French physicist-philosopher Jean E. Charon - we need to understand first what is spin in electron.
In physics spin understood as movement of particle around it's axis. In standard physics electrons have a spin of +½ or –½ or simply called a "plus" spin or "minus" spin. When two electrons come together their spins interact and either their spin align in parallel or antiparallel. These alignments affect whether electrons bond (pairing in orbitals) or repel.

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Charon extended this theory further:
Each electron’s spin is not just a “±½ value,” but a tiny rhythm or vibration. These rhythms can synchronize with others - just as two notes in music can form an interval. The “intervals” are not sound waves here, but mathematical ratios of spin orientations and energies.
When two electrons coming together, if spins fall into simple number ratios - like 2:1 (octave), 3:2 (fifth), 4:3 (fourth) - this produces stable bonds (like paired electrons in atomic orbitals, or coherent energy states). If spins misalign in more complex ratios, not reducible to simple integers ,then this produces instability or forces that push electrons apart.

So how do electrons "talk" to each other ? Electrons interact through spin resonance. When two electrons come close physically or energetically, their spins “compare” rhythms. Like two singers, they either tune into a harmonic ratio (octave, fifth, etc.) or fall into dissonance.
If they form harmonic relationship - they stabilize, share information, form part of a larger structure (atom, molecule). If they dissonant - they repel or destabilize the structure.

Charon points out that electrons have a "choice" an option to choose between the different "ways of action", and that they actually exercise their option. But this is just what the mind is per definitionem: the agent that chooses, writes J-E Berendt. 

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​Charon writes about electron: "Inside its micro-universe, the electron encloses a space that is able, first, to store information, second, to make this information available again during each pulsation period of its cycle by way of a sort of 'memory system', and third, to control complex operations by communicating and cooperating with the other electrons of the system. "

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Electrons by nature are like mini-black holes. It has unimaginable density (17 orders of magnitude denser than a neutron star) and curvature of space around them is the same as around the astrophysics black-hole. That means that time of electron is not the same as our time, which is linear from past to future. It's rather a "mental time" which runs cyclically, so everything store once, can be retrieved during any further cycle.
Unlike real astrophysical black holes, this electrons do no collapse or evaporate. While stars burn out and even protons may decay over vast timescales, the electron persists.

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Charon writes: "An electron that was successively part of a tree, a human being, a tiger, and another human being will thus remember for all time the experiences it has collected during these different lives. The electron will maintain within itself all of its experiences as tree, as human being No.1, as tiger, and as human being No.2, to whose organisms it belonged at certain times."

For him, this meant the electron is a true carrier of continuity - the prime store of memory.
Electrons for Charon is the “soul-particles” of the cosmos, bridging matter, mind, and memory. 

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Then J-E Berendt continues:
"The electron's recollections are stored and controlled by it's spins, and they are assembled with the help of photons. Each progression of the spin leads to an increase in information. Photons control not only memory but the process of cognition. As Charon points out, the are messengers. The language in which they communicate is a language in harmonic progressions, in tones.
In comparison to an electron that has existed as part of an animal or a human being for a long time, an electron that has been in dead matter has a totally different level of information. In a sense, both have gone through different 'courses of education', which makes it improbable that a spin exchange (Charon speaks of 'communication,' 'mating,' 'deeds,' 'cognition,' and 'love,') will take place between them - which corresponds exactly to normal human behavior. Psychologist Oscar Ichazo writes: 'Love is the recognition of the same consciousness in oneself and in the other person.' And Charon notes: 'In contrast to the views that most organized beings have worked out for themselves, it is their electrons that give or elicit love. The organized being itself is only the 'vehicle' of this love, and even that only in a narrow sector of space and time.'
Thus we can vary - and sharpen - Ichazo's statement in the following formulation: Love is the recognition of identical spin states, that is, of identical harmonic states, identical vibrations or, finally identical harmonies (which is why in everyday language we speak of a "harmonious" relationship between lovers.) Hence love is accord (from the Latin - cor, 'heart'.) The more 'harmonic' it is in the literal sense, the more 'harmonious' it will be figuratively. This also makes it obvious that the processes of love, its 'deeds' (caresses, union, orgasm), are steered through harmonic states and at the same time (in a kind of feedback mechanism, as in the control loops of cybernetics) themselves elicit harmonic processes of increasing power and intensity, just as poets of all periods (Shakespear, for one) have known: Love is music." 

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Symbol of Dao represents Harmony, as intrinsic law of the Universe which underlies every aspect of creation. Human body so as it is mirroring the whole macrocosm, also represents this harmony, hence Dao. Inner harmony is health, harmony in relationships is love and harmony with the outer world is the Path - would say taoist practitioner.

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But at the material level, we not only experience our body as separate from its environment but even we separated our mind from our body. This deep split has become fatal for the humanity as a whole, because it has alienated us from our feelings. No longer able to attune to the signals of the body - our most immediate and natural language of connection - we grow estranged from ourselves, from the Earth, and from one another. The result is a pervasive state of conflict across all dimensions of our being, leaving us disoriented, uncertain, and profoundly dissatisfied. 

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Jung often emphasized that neurosis arises when we are cut off from our instinctual life.
For Jung, instincts were not primitive forces to be suppressed but the living roots of the psyche. They connect us to the body, to nature, and to the archetypal patterns of life. When instincts flow freely, they provide orientation, vitality, and meaning - like an inner compass that aligns us with life’s rhythms.

Neurosis occurs when consciousness separates itself from these instinctual foundations. This can happen when:

• Culture or morality imposes rigid rules that repress natural impulses.

• Intellect dominates to the point of silencing the body’s wisdom.

• Fear or trauma cuts us off from authentic feeling and desire.

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The result is a psychic split: a person lives in their head, or in social roles, while the deeper currents of the psyche are denied. Symptoms - anxiety, depression, obsessions - arise as the unconscious tries to break through the blockage. Jung saw neurosis not only as illness but also as a signal - a cry from the unconscious that life is out of balance. The alienated instinct seeks expression through dreams, fantasies, bodily symptoms, or projections onto others.

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​For Jung, neurosis is the psyche’s way of saying:
“You have wandered too far from the ground of your being. Return to the living roots of instinct, and you will rediscover wholeness.” 

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Science of harmonics shows that any form of organic life - fish, flower, a leaf, a beetle, any creature - is sound, and even the most 'beautiful' form of the inorganic world, the crystals - are sound as well, meaning that their structure is dominated by numbers which can form consonances. Many things which we find to be "beautiful" in nature, art and the human body follow the laws of the golden section. The proportions of golden section vacillate around the musical intervals of major (3:5) and minor (5:8) sixths and and around so-called ecmelic intervals (8:13, 13:21 etc. ), which can be interpreted as variations of the sixths. 

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Hans Kayser suggested that a crystal is like frozen music:
The angles, axes, and faces of a crystal are built on whole-number ratios, the same kind of ratios that form the harmonic series in sound. When these geometric proportions are translated into notes, the crystal’s structure becomes a chord or scale. Just as every musical instrument has its own tuning, each crystal has a “key” or fundamental tone, defined by the numerical proportions in its inner lattice. By studying its geometric ratios, we can “hear” its form through musical translation.

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Kayser who studied rock crystals in the mountains of Switzerland writes:
Anyone, who plays these sample notations on an instrument will hear how individual - in fact, how "modern" - the surface scaling of each of the various crystal is. Often utterly magnificent sequences of notes are the result. Who knows what surprises we might encounter if we would take the trouble to notate all these themes and chords. We would certainly have a collection of musical structures ranging from the simplest and most monumental to the most differentiated and interesting, and inexhaustible source of themes for counterpoint and polyphony. 

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Where crystals grow outward through fixed, repetitive ratios, leaves and flowers unfold dynamically, like music in motion. Their veins, spirals, and symmetries are built upon the same whole-number proportions that define harmonic intervals. Kayser believed that plants represent a higher harmony compared to minerals.
The same mathematical laws that lock a crystal into a perfect cube or hexagon come alive and spiral in a leaf, producing the organic forms we associate with growth. 

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Resent research also shows that plants can hear each other. Plants in a meadow, field or forest will wither if their vibrations relate disharmonically to other plants in the vicinity. Flower lovers have always known that certain kinds of plants do not do well in close proximity to certain other kinds of plants even though they may favor the same types of soil and climate.

Investigation by the photo-acoustic spectroscopy by David Cahen and Gordon Kirkbright reveal that even a simple corn stalk has a sound. Of course this ultrasonic sounds are beyond human hearing capacity, but imagine thousands of stalks growing next to each other in a field, each with it's own sound, a flowing symphony of sounds.

Recent experiments with highly sensitive microphones revealed that plants emit ultrasonic clicks and pops, especially when stressed - tomato and tobacco plants emit sounds when cut or dehydrated (20–100 kHz), other plants “listen” to these signals and may change their growth or defence behaviourior. This suggests a silent acoustic conversation between plants, happening at frequencies beyond our hearing.
Some startups are already developing AI systems that listen to plant soundscapes to optimize greenhouse conditions.

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Plants do not have ears, analogy what we can think of is that a whole plant is resonating body, like violin. The cells are strings, and the vibrations of the environment “pluck” them. For example, roots can detect low-frequency vibrations of water flowing through soil and grow toward it.

The underground mycelium networks (fungal symbiosis around plant roots) can act as natural sound conductors - vibrations can travel through the soil and fungal threads. These vibrations might carry information about predators, nutrient flows, or water sources.

Imagine a sunflower bending not only toward sunlight but also toward the subtle vibrations of its neighbors - a plant under attack by caterpillars releases chemical scents and ultrasonic sounds, neighboring plants “hear” these stress signals and preemptively thicken their leaves or produce bitter compounds. This creates a community-wide defense orchestra, with each plant as a musician playing its survival tune. 

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​It's no wonder then, that plants can "hear" and differentiate various kinds of music.
In the biology institute of Colorado a team of young biologists piped radio music into two green-houses with cucurbits; one greenhouse heard music from a Denver rock station, the other heard a classical station.
Bird and Tompkins relate that:
"The cucurbits were hardy indifferent to the two musical forms: those exposed to Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert and other eighteenth - and nineteenth-century European scores grew toward radio transistor, one of them even twining itself lovingly around it. The other squashes grew away from the rock broadcasts and even tried to climb the slippery walls of their glass cage." 

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Even the more astonishing experiment made an American biologist Dorothy Retallack.
She planted and kept up to three groups of plants, each group consisting of the same kind of plants, grown on the same soil under identical temperature and watering conditions. The first group was exposed to music by Johann Sebastian Bach, the second one, to sitar music played by great master of classical Indian music Ravi Shankar, and the third one, to no music at all.
Bird and Tompkins report:
"The plants gave positive evidence of liking Bach, since they leaned an unprecedented thirty-five degrees toward the preludes. But even this affirmation was far exceeded by their reaction to Shankar: in their straining to reach the source of the classical Indian music they bent more than halfway to the horizontal, at angles in excess of sixty degrees, the nearest one almost embracing the speaker.
In order not be swayed by her own special taste for the classical music of both hemispheres Mrs. Retallack, at the behest of hundreds of young people, followed Bach and Shankar with trials of folk and "country and western" music. Her plants seemed to produce no more reaction than those in the silent chamber ... Jazz caused her a real surprise. When her plants heard recordings as varied as Duke Ellington's "Sound Call" and two discs by Louis Armstrong, 55 percent of the plants leaned fifteen to twenty degrees toward the speaker, and growth was more abundant than in the silent chamber."

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In the animal kingdom, inhabitants of the deep sea have always represented synonym of silence. Now we know that especially the depth of the ocean is filled with sound. The deep sea is a world of near-total darkness, immense pressure, and extreme cold - yet it is anything but silent.
Beneath the crushing depths, countless creatures produce sound to communicate, navigate, hunt, and defend themselves. These sounds form a vast, living orchestra of the abyss, much of it beyond the range of human hearing.

Light does not penetrate beyond about 200 meters, so vision is useless. Sound, however, travels five times faster in water than in air and can carry for hundreds of kilometers. Deep-sea animals have evolved to “speak” and “listen” using clicks, rumbles, pulses, and even songs, much like plants respond to vibration but on a far more complex level.

Many of them have antennae and other means of electric transmission. In addition to the auditory waves they produce with their "sound instruments", they permeate the oceans with network of electric signals. The scientific research on deep-sea sounds is only in its beginning stages. The predecessors of whales and dolphins, the maritime mammals (Cetacea), were land animals. They were able to conquer the sea and the depths with no light whatsoever only by developing the capability to produce sounds, to transmit and receive and interpret them. They do so (like other maritime animals) with the aid of echo effects, and in this way can locate partners, targets, objects and enemies as well. 

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Whales and dolphins are the virtuosos of ocean sound.  Even deep-diving species like sperm whales produce astonishing vocalizations:  clicks - for echolocation, louder than a jet engine ; codas - rhythmic patterns used for social communication;  songs - long, evolving sequences of tones, like the haunting music of humpback whales.   

Computer analysis of these exchanges has shown an information density of between one and ten million bits per half hour of whale song - which is the approximate amount of information contained in the *Odyssey!*  

Sperm whales can dive to 3,000 meters, their clicks echoing through Sound Fixing and Ranging (SOFAR) channels, carrying messages across entire ocean basins.  Long before man invented the radio and the transmission of sound by way of electric waves, these animals were "transmitting" without tubes and transistors. 

 

Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative) brought together 50 International scientists and  has an intention to collect vast amount of raw data and put it through AI to decipher the sperm-whale codas. The purpose of project is to be able to discover: "If we are able to talk to other species?"  This species by the way has the biggest brain on the planet.  

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Dolphins produce clicks that travel through water, bounce off objects, and return as echoes. By analyzing the time delay, intensity, and frequency of the returning echo, they can “see” their environment in astonishing detail. Echolocation allows them to: detect fish buried in sand, recognize the difference between metal and wood, perceive distances, shapes, and even internal structures. This creates a kind of sonar-based 3D vision far more precise than our eyesight in murky water.

Dolphins produce signature whistles - unique, name-like sounds that identify individuals. Each dolphin develops its own whistle early in life, and others can call it specifically, almost like saying: “Hey, you!” Beyond clicks and whistles, dolphins use complex burst-pulsed sounds, like rapid staccato chatter. These sounds are often used in social negotiation. In a pod, burst-pulsed sounds prevent physical conflict - acting like a sonic diplomacy tool.

Dolphins are real musicians of the sea. They layer clicks, whistles, and pulses into patterns, creating a rich soundscape. These sonic combinations carry emotional nuance, much like how music conveys mood beyond words. There’s evidence dolphins can mimic rhythms and even dance to beats, linking them to our sense of music. 

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And what about us humans and human world ?
The proportions of the human body have fascinated thinkers for thousands of years. Many ancient traditions saw the body as a living instrument, tuned like a lyre or a harp. Just as music is built on whole-number ratios of frequencies, the body also expresses certain ratios through its geometry. These correspondences appear in Vedic teachings, Pythagorean philosophy, and even Renaissance art like Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.
The octave represents (2:1) perfect doubling of frequency, symbolizing symmetry, balance and harmony. In the body it is the span of the arms which is often very close to the height of the body – an octave relationship . The perfect fifth (3:2) is associated with vitality, movement, and the “life force.” In the body the forearm and hand together compared to the upper arm often fall close to a 3:2 ratio, some proportions of hand to face also approximate this interval. This ratio governs how limbs articulate, much like the perfect fifth defines harmonic tension and release in music. The perfect fourth (4:3) expresses structural grounding. It is the length of the head compared to the length of the chest. Some relationships between shoulder width and torso height. Symbolically, the fourth represents the stability of the physical body, like a square.
The major third brings beauty and balance, closely tied to the Golden Ratio (φ ≈ 1.618). The length of the face compared to the length of the hand often reflects this ratio and the distance from the navel to the sternum compared to sternum to head.
Many classical sculptors used this proportion to create aesthetically pleasing figures.
The phrase Nada Brahma – “The World is Sound” – reflects this harmony, showing that our very form is a frozen symphony. 

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Throughout history, many sacred buildings have been designed as "frozen music" - embodying the same harmonic ratios that govern musical intervals. Ancient architects saw temples not just as physical spaces, but as vibrational instruments, tuned to align the human body, the cosmos, and the divine.

Pythagoras (6th century BCE) discovered that musical harmony arises from simple numerical ratios:

• Octave = 2:1

• Perfect Fifth = 3:2

• Perfect Fourth = 4:3

• Major Third = 5:4

• Minor Third = 6:5

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These ratios were seen as universal laws connecting sound, geometry, and spirit.
Pythagoreans believed:
“A temple must be built according to the same laws that govern a lyre or a harp.”
This idea inspired later architectural traditions - particularly in Greece, Rome, India, and Gothic Europe.

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The Parthenon in Athens is one of the clearest examples, where width : length ≈ 9:4 → close to two perfect fourths (4:3) stacked and height : width ratios approach octaves (2:1) and fifths (3:2). Columns were spaced like notes in a scale, creating a rhythmic visual "melody."
Greek architects believed this harmony invited Apollo (god of music and light) to dwell in the temple.
In Vedic tradition, temples were designed as yantras - geometrical forms that amplify sound and consciousness. The central garbhagriha (sanctum) represents the "drone" or root note (like a tanpura's fundamental tone) and tuter mandapas (halls) expand in ratios similar to a harmonic overtone series. Sri Yantra, found in many temples, is constructed from intersecting triangles based on musical intervals, especially 3:2 (perfect fifth) and 4:3 (perfect fourth).
In Brihadeeswarar Temple in Tamil Nadu proportions follow the ratios of the Sama Veda chants sung inside it, the tower resonates with mantras, turning the entire temple into a living instrument.

Gothic cathedrals are some of the most literal expressions of "frozen music": the height of the nave to width of the transept often equals a perfect fifth (3:2), rose windows are designed with proportions of octaves and fourths, mirroring sacred scales so the entire cathedral acted as a giant resonator for Gregorian chant.
When choirs sing in Chartres Cathedral which is in France, the building’s geometry amplified overtones, making chants seem otherworldly.

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“Architecture is frozen music.” - Goethe