Thursday 21 June 2018

Stuff On My Phone (18)

Movie soundtrack albums do not feature heavily in my music collection, it's not a genre that fires my enthusiasm. Perhaps oddly, television programme soundtracks have made more of an impression on me, with the original Due South compilation CD experiencing some serious airtime, blasting out of the speakers as a holidaying Tense Towers family drove to all points of the compass.

But I will save that album until a future post. Or two, he said, teasingly...

However, staying with the travelling theme, but rather in time and space, this morning I had a hankering to listen to the incidental music composed by Sheridan Tongue for Brian Cox's 'Wonders of the Universe' documentary series. Whatever one's feelings about Brian the boy band member/scientist/tv presenter, the documentaries he fronts always contain some sumptuously-explained bit of science magic which I find engrossing.

Can you have science magic? I'm thinking that, maybe, scientists and magicians will quibble over the point, but the rest of us can be amazed, entertained and enthralled in equal measure.

Where were we?, Oh yes, the purchasing of this particular CD was inspired by one sound snippet, 'Mini Solar System', featured at the beginning of an explanation of star death and the creation of the elements, in the episode 'Stardust'. At the time, I was initially a bit bemused as to why Brian was wandering around a derelict prison (which was clearly unsafe!), not wearing any PPE but carrying a can of aerosol paint, and stopping occasionally to spray graffiti on the walls (how very dare he?!). As ever, it was all simile and metaphor for the process being explained (I got there in the end!).

The clip, linked here, is six minutes of gorgeously-filmed, engagingly-told science, from the opening aerial shot of the roof of the prison, to the disappearing of our Sun behind the building, which symbolically precedes the denouement.

And remember, "Every atom of carbon... in every living thing on the planet... was produced in the heart of a dying star."

2 comments:

Spadger said...

Was the cheese nice?

Imperfect and Tense said...

Isn't that the Moon, rather than the Sun?