To infinity and beyond! Hear this space: Music’s obsession with the cosmic

The 510 million square kilometres of Earth are usually sufficient for seeking out creative inspiration. Sometimes, though, this green and blue football just don’t cut-it. The solution? How about grabbing a 20p bag of Space Raiders, nabbing a cheeky Milky Way bar and hopping onto the mind’s Apollo; a free-of-charge shuttle service to cosmic imagination.

Space has certainly been a fruitful source for all creative endeavours, and especially – even though it is quite ironic that you can’t hear a bloody thing all the way up there – music. There’s thousands of tracks, aesthetics, sounds – hell, even a Liverpudlian Britpop band named themselves after it – inspired by space. Now, it’s been taken even further, with Nasa unveiling a Soundcloud account of space recordings last Thursday. Boasting albums such as ‘Mercury Sounds’ and ‘Apollo Sounds’ and a few ‘singles’ (Wheel Stop’, ‘Vector Transfer’) the account features everything from Neil Armstrong’s ‘One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’ to ‘Houston, we’ve had a problem’. On top of that, here’s some other reasons why space is currently making gravitational waves in all spheres of the sonic system.