NEWS & VIEWS Let’s share our music of the spheres LETTER From

We were delighted to see the article on Sibelius and astronomy in the April issue of A&G (Whittet 2015). We were aware that Sibelius was deeply inspired by atmospheric phenom-ena, picturing storms and aurorae in his tone poems Tapiola and Nightride and Sunrise (Aplin & Wil-liams 2011). In Sibelius’s 150th birth-day year, Whittet offered further insight into Sibelius’s astronomical influences both through his family background, and his subsequent influences on astronomy through the eponymous asteroid and crater on Mercury. Through our work investigating the effects of weather on music (Aplin & Williams 2011, 2012, Brown et al. 2015), we found that the approach of combining music and science is an effective medium for communicating the variability of the natural world to non-scientists. Several studies already exist explor-ing the intersections between astronomy and music (e.g. Cabal-lero et al. 2008), many of which were listed by Fraknoi (2009), but there has not yet been a quantita-tive study using our methodology. We wondered if readers of A&G might like to contribute to a list of other space and astronomy influences in all types of music, for a possible future article. Examples from pop music might include The Final Countdown (Europe) and Walking on the Milky Way (OMD), and apart from the obvious Planets in classical music, another example would be Debussy’s Au Clair de la Lune. We have set up a share