I'm Major Jackson, and this is the Slowdown.

Once, as I walked with a colleague past a group of street buskers,

they said very casually, music is overrated.

I couldn't believe my ears.

This was in New Orleans.

It is from this city that some of the world's greatest musicians

gifted us an ability to hear our joyous moments

and to withstand our saddest occasions.

From Louis Armstrong to Irma Thomas to Big Frida.

For a few minutes longer, I lingered and listened

awed by the banjo, watchtub, bass, and violin of a jug band

playing with fervor and humor.

What in life at my afternoon registered merely as faint amusement

to my colleague.

I knew we'd never grow to become real friends.

I believe life, even the cosmos, is saturated with sound.

I'm not alone.

The ancient mathematician Pythagoras and his followers discovered

that a harmony of sounds exist in our solar system based on

each planet's orbit around the sun.

I would have been friends with him and those subsequent generations

of mathematicians and astronomers who then sought to represent

...