I heard gravitational waves before they were detected. 1 I was sitting in a pub in May 2015 with MIT physicists Scott Hughes and David Kaiser, my headphones looped into a laptop. Hughes was readying to play us some interstellar sounds: digital audio files, he explained, that were sonic simulations of what gravitational waves might sound like if, one day, such cosmic undulations arrived at detection devices on Earth. Gravitational waves are tiny but consequential wriggles in space-time, first

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... orized by Einstein in 1916vibrations generated, for example, by such colossal events as the collision of black holes or the detonation of supernovae. Listening to Hughes's .wav representations of black holes spiraling into one another, I heard washing-machine whirs, Theremin-like glissandos, and cybernetic chirps-noises reminiscent, I mused, of midtwentieth century sci-fi movies (see Taylor 2001 on space-age music). Audio 1. Circular inspiral, spin 35.94% of maximum, orbital plane 0Њ, 0Њ viewing angle. Created by Pei-Lan Hsu, using code written by Scott Hughes. Audio 2. Generic inspiral, eccentricity e = 0.7, inclination i = 25Њ. Created by Pei-Lan Hsu, using code written by Scott Hughes.