What do you get when you mix a Baghdad scholar, a German astronomer, a Chinese sage and a guitar chord?
The answer is: a digital zen that packs a good dose of wow to your weekend. Are you ready?
On Wednesday, Sri Aman recorded an API reading of 167. Serian wasn’t far behind at 164, Samarahan at 162 — all three comfortably inside the “unhealthy” band, which starts at 101 and doesn’t let go until 201. It wasn’t just us.
Cheras hit 159, Shah Alam 157, Johan Setia 158, Putrajaya 158, Nilai 162. On paper, that’s a wall of numbers. In the body, it’s a familiar tightness in the chest and a sky that’s stopped being a sky. Just as long as we don’t return the 1997 haze, we all should be okay.
Now, beyond that — here’s where it gets interesting.
For weeks, I’ve been staring at that same grey until somewhere along the way, I stopped looking and began to listen instead. Not to anything profound — just to the ordinary five minutes before the rain and the five minutes after. There’s a specific quality to the air in that window. A pressure change you can almost hear before you can feel it.
I make music for a living under the name Maqluk, so noticing frequencies in places most people wouldn’t think to look is, in a way, part of the job.
I’m not a scientist and I’m certainly no astronomer — I just followed a curiosity further than I meant to, and it turns out the air, the rain, and the haze sitting over Sri Aman right now are all, in a very literal sense, playing a note.
Every planet has a key
In 1978, a Swiss mathematician named Hans Cousto worked out something called the Cosmic Octave — a formula for taking the orbital period of a planet, the time it takes to go once around the sun, and, through repeated octave-doubling, translating that impossibly slow cycle into a frequency the human ear can actually hear. Earth’s orbit becomes a note. So does Mercury’s. So does the Moon’s. To be precise about what this is and isn’t: no planet is broadcasting sound across space, because space has no air for sound to travel through.
What Cousto did was mathematical translation, not eavesdropping — but the maths itself is real, built on the same doubling principle that separates one octave from the next on any instrument you own. Every planet, in that sense, does have a key.
That idea is older than Cousto by a thousand years. In 9th-century Baghdad, al-Kindi was the first to seriously theorise Arabic music as something governed by ratio rather than instinct.
A century later, al-Farabi finished the job in a text literally called The Great Book of Music — laying out, in mathematical detail, the ratios that would become the maqam system still used across the Islamic world today.
Then in 1619, a German astronomer named Johannes Kepler took that same ratio logic and pointed it at the sky. He noticed that a planet’s fastest and slowest orbital speeds sat in ratios matching musical intervals — a perfect fifth here, a major third there — and called the resulting work Harmonices Mundi: the Harmony of the World. Al-Farabi never met Kepler. But they were doing the same maths, six centuries and one continent apart.
This brings me back to the haze.Haze isn’t formless. It’s droplets — fine, suspended, floating in exactly the disorganised way that makes it unhealthy to breathe.
Researchers building fog chambers to study haze and fog dispersal have found that low-frequency sound, played at the right pressure, causes those droplets to collide and merge into particles heavy enough to fall out of the air. It’s called acoustic agglomeration, and in lab conditions, it has already outperformed older methods like hygroscopic salt. It isn’t deployed over a river basin yet — but it’s proven in principle.
The reading in Sri Aman is, in a sense, just noise. Unorganised. Waiting for the right frequency to bring it into order.
The lesson water already knew
Which is where I keep landing on something older than all of it. In the Dao De Jing, Laozi points to water as the clearest teacher there is: nothing in the world is softer, and yet nothing is better at wearing down what is hard and rigid. Not by force. Not by attacking the obstacle head-on, but by yielding into it, again and again, until the rock has no choice but to change shape. That’s the same principle underneath wu wei — often translated as effortless action, though what it really means is acting in accordance with what’s already there instead of fighting it. The haze in Sri Aman won’t be shouted down. Nobody is going to punch a hole in 167 API through sheer will. But the right frequency, applied gently and consistently, moves what force cannot. Water didn’t carve valleys by being strong. It carved them by being patient and precisely tuned to what stood in its way.
I find that almost funny, in the best way. Every time you hit a chord — on a guitar, a piano, a phone keyboard app, whatever’s in reach — you are doing, at a tiny human scale, the exact same thing al-Farabi wrote down, Kepler found in the stars, and Laozi watched a river do to stone: organising vibration into ratio instead of forcing an outcome.
You’re not doing anything mystical. You’re touching the same maths that holds a planet’s orbit together, and the same patience that might one day pull a haze reading down from 167 to something breathable. We’re not too small to matter in that picture. We’re just, most days, too distracted and too impatient to notice we’re already part of it.
This week’s practice
Play one chord today — on anything, badly is fine. Can’t play? Open YouTube, look up C Harmonic Minor chords, and just hum along to them. The point isn’t to sound good — it’s to actually feel the vibration, not just read about it. Sit in it for three seconds and don’t force where it goes. Nothing dramatic. Just a reminder that the thing vibrating under your fingers, the thing keeping Earth in its orbit, and the water that outlasts stone are all answering to the same law: not force, but the right frequency, held with patience.
Want something better? Teach yourself throat singing. If I can, so can you — and believe me when I say it’s worth the effort, if only to know that we are musical creatures. Just google both: C Harmonic Minor, and throat singing. And since you are on YouTube, might as well type Maqluk. And check out my latest song. Finally, on the days the API readings are unhealthy and the mountains disappear, that might be the closest thing we have to remembering the world is still, underneath the noise, in tune.
The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune.
