Saturn’s rings can sing! Since the rings are composed of trillions of icy particles all in orbit around the giant planet we can apply the same pitch scaling that we used for the moons to the entire ring system. We start from the outer edge and scan through the rings inwards with the pitch being determined by the orbital frequency of the ring particles. The resulting notes of the outer edge (the F ring) and the inner edge (of the C ring) are approximately a D# and a G#, one and a half octaves higher. We assigned these notes to a combination of organs and strings, inspired by the instrumentation of the main theme of the movie Interstellar. Since this provides a nearly continuous sweep of musical pitches there will be many places within the rings where the tones of the moons resonate, causing disturbances in the rings. In this way the rings are similar to a radio receiver that is tuned to every frequency at the same time. The harmony of the resonances with Saturn’s small moon Janus are explored in Part II.

As we scan through the rings, the volume of the tone is modulated using the observed brightness of the rings. Experts will have noticed that we used an image of the un-illuminated side of the rings to generate this curve. We applied the same processing to an image of the illuminated side (see below), but as you might expect, the dark side is much more interesting. You can hear and see several interesting features in the rings system such as gaps, ringlets, flat spots, plateaus, ramps, and density waves. Some of these have been labeled in the figure but there are many more. The piano chord after the scan was inspired by the final chord of The Beatles’ A Day In The Life, which also follows a tense, crescendo with steadily increasing pitch.