We have the music of the spheres, music of the genes, and deeeep brown notes.

Soon we may have body notes:

Scientists are developing ways of capturing human movement in three dimensions which would allow music to be created with the gesture of an arm.

....The system is being developed at the school of music in the University of Leeds.

Dr Kia Ng of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Scientific Research in Music is leading the project, which captures 3D movements using infra-red light.

The light is projected onto tiny reflective balls attached to clothing and monitored by 12 cameras.

The computer recognises the changing positions of the balls and turns different gestures into instructions for music software.

"Effectively a person could play a note by blinking an eye or moving a foot. The possibility is for anybody to control a musical composition," Dr Ng told the BBC programme Go Digital.

Of course there are risks that the wrong gesture could lead to a bum note, so the system is also going to have a more pre-composed system that can intelligently guess what a series of gestures represents.

"The biggest challenge is to train the system to anticipate movement," said Dr Ng.

"To make sense of a gesture it need to know not only where an object has been and where it is, but also where it will be," he added.

He is hopeful that the system can be put to the test at a live concert by the end of next year. [BBC]

This story is also fascinating from a philosophical standpoint: music is literally the dance of particles in space - movement IS music. As T. S. Elliot said, "There is only the dance."

All human societies dance. Even those that don't have "music" as we know it have some sort of ritualistic rhythmic movement. This movement is often that society's most important form of expression. The Dogon of West Africa dance to honor their dead and to "assert their vitality in the face of death." (Maybury-Lewis in Millennium)

The Native American Ghost Dancers of the Western Plains of the U.S. sought no less than to bring back an army of the dead through dance to resurrect their way of life lost to white rule. The Islamic whirling dervishes used dance to merge with the supreme consciousness by spinning their way into a state of natural intoxication. The Turkish government outlawed this activity. The Siberian shamans use dance toward a similar end. The Chinese use t'ai chi to induce a sense of calm and balance.

There are reasons that dance is imbued with this kind of power. In The Silent Pulse, George Leonard states, "Music is a reflection in sound of the world's structure, making explicit the rhythmic quality of all things...The body is made of emptiness and rhythm. At the heart of the body and the world, there is no solidity - there is only the dance."