In 1952, the American composer John Cage wrote a work in which a pianist is heard to open the lid of a piano, but then to play nothing for four minutes and however-many seconds might be left.

A lot of people sniggered, as you might imagine, but Mr Cage did have a serious purpose. He had been trying, in a soundproof chamber at Harvard University, to reproduce pure silence. The experiment made him understand that it was impossible - that "no silence exists that is not pregnant with sound," as he concluded, even if what is born is only a heartbeat, or the sound of breathing.

So is a kind of blank musical canvas. His purpose is to draw to our attention the impossibility of silence by allowing the canvas to paint itself, every time the piece is performed, with the sounds that surround members of the audience, but which they try not to allow themselves to hear - breathing, rustling, coughing, traffic outside the concert hall and so on.

Silence is an unknowable perfection for the living.

There are people who disagree - Madame Blavatsky of the Theosophists, for example (the example I'm going to give really is a translation, but I am still driven to comment that she is a lady who writes in English as if her thoughts were being simultaneously translated from an ancient dialect by some dark, occult power). She promises that converts to Theosophy can attain a state in which silence is possible:

"Behold! thou hast become the light, thou hast become the Sound, thou art thy Master and thy God. Thou art THYSELF the object of thy search: the VOICE unbroken, that resounds throughout eternities, exempt from change, from sin exempt, the seven sounds in one, the VOICE OF THE SILENCE."

Oh, yes. The difficulty is that to reach that point, you have to get through such rigours, including, as I recall, walking on water, that you may as well be at the point Hamlet had reached when he said: "The rest is silence."

Those of us who wish to keep on living for a while are doomed not to get there. The level of ambient noise in the world seems to rise with every passing year. In his book, Timothy Day estimates that nearly 70 percent of the sounds that fill our environment at the dawn of the 21st Century are those made by technology - machines, traffic, cellphones, Muzak and so on.

I suspect if Mr Day ever came to Bermuda and stood on a street in Hamilton during a mid-summer Friday evening rush hour, we might earn a mention in his next book in, at the very least, a long, angry footnote.

But my purpose, though, is not to bang on about the impossibility of silence on Church Street. It is to share a recent discovery - not even outer space is exempt from this noise business.

I should explain myself - any schoolchild knows that where there is no air, there is no sound. So although we cannot hear sounds in space, we can hear the sounds of space by using scientific instruments on spacecraft as our ears. Scientific instruments detect and record radio waves, then transmit the recorded information to Earth. Once the transmitted information has been received, the data can be converted or translated into sounds.

That doesn't make the ambient noise of space any the less real - the National Aeronautics and Space Administration often puts out press releases that mention them - like this one from January of last year:

"One audio clip produced from radio waves that NASA's Cassini spacecraft detected near Jupiter was described last week by the Los Angeles Times as sounding `like a troop of howler monkeys battling underwater'."

(You can listen by aiming your browser at: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/press-releases-00010104-ia-a.cfm. It's available in a couple of formats. Don't expect howler monkeys, though - that's a real stretch. It sounds to me more like a depressed and rather confused goldfinch.)

"Cassini's radio and plasma wave science instrument detected the waves at low radio frequencies, which University of Iowa scientists have converted to sound waves to make the patterns audible. The waves from which the new audio clip was developed were in the thin solar wind of charged particles that fills the space between the Sun and its planets. Cassini detected the waves on 1 January at a distance of 6.2 million miles from Jupiter."

These noises are the sounds made by lightning bolts in Jupiter's atmosphere, for example, or the rumblings of electron cyclotron waves flowing through pockets of ionized gas millions of miles from Earth.

They have been collected, over 35 years, by a University of Iowa space physicist, Dr. Donald Gurnett. And because they were so extraordinary and so fascinating, NASA asked a well-known modern classical string quartet, the Kronos Quartet, to organise a work based on them. Dr. Gurnett was there to share a standing ovation when , an hour-long piece written by an American composer, Terry Riley, for the Quartet and a 60-voice choir, was given its world premiere at the University of Iowa in October.

The 67-year old Riley, a pioneer of sampling, tape-looping and systems music, best known for the pieces (1964) and (1969), needed no persuasion when he was asked to write the piece, particularly once he had spent a day with Dr. Gurnett.

"He's so turned on to what he's doing that he gets you infected with it right away," Riley says, "even if you don't understand exactly what he's talking about. The thing that attracted me was the organic quality of the sounds. They didn't feel alien to our experience on earth. In fact, many of them reminded me of the experiments I was doing in the 1950s with musique concr?te, using monophonic tape recorders, dropping marbles on to a piano sounding board and so on. You wouldn't have realised they were recorded around Jupiter or Uranus."

Riley picked out the sounds he liked best and wrote the music for the quartet around them, in ten short movements. Kronos's leader, David Harrington, in turn, had received further inspiration at NASA's jet propulsion lab in Pasadena, where he was shown films and slides of the space missions. "Obviously we were going to need a visual element," he says, and he turned to an English Rock'n'Roller to provide it.

Willie Williams, who has designed and staged U2's shows for the past 20 years, left his native Sheffield at the age of 18 to join the punk movement in London. He worked the lights for Deaf School, Stiff Little Fingers and others before hooking up with Ireland's nascent superstars. The Zoo TV tour won him praise and awards, and he has subsequently worked with David Bowie, the Rolling Stones and the dance group La La La Human Steps. Like Harrington and Riley, he readily succumbed to Gurnett's enthusiasm.

"I actually did A Level physics, so I have a certain understanding of what's going on," he says. "It was something special to be able to ask him all the questions you've always wanted to ask your own astrophysicist. Is there life on Mars? Do you believe in God? Is the universe ever going to contract again?"

He surrounded the quartet on stage with a small forest of silver sticks, each tipped with light. Each musician uses a fibre-optic wand to trigger samples of the space sounds. Behind them, images are projected on to three giant screens - rather like the climax of Abel Gance's silent film, - to illustrate and enhance the music in a variety of ways, some of them unexpected.

Initially free from explicit meaning, the work took on a different hue after 11 September, 2001. Riley, who had already begun composing, laid down his pencil.

"I had to stop writing for a while because I wanted to make sure that everything I put into the piece was really relevant to the events. I thought about composers like Debussy, who were suddenly faced with war breaking out when they were at the height of their career.

"What you do is make a deeper spiritual commitment. What you're doing has to point the way to the kind of world you would like to live in."

If you are going to be in England in March, you can find out how successful he was for yourself. is going to have its UK premi?re at the Barbican on March 22. You can book online at http://www.barbican.org.uk/home.asp.