Astronaut's lunar heartbeat lives on in Lennon cover

Forty-five years ago, on July 20, 1969, the Apollo 11 mission touched down on the moon and took "one giant leap for mankind." Artist Louise Gold may have just created the perfect sound track for marking that historical feat.

Gold, a Berlin-based singer/songwriter, recorded a version of John Lennon's "Oh My Love" using astronaut Neil Armstrong's heartbeat as the basic rhythm and added audio frequency sounds evolved from data collected by the Voyager spacecraft as it passed Venus.

It started when Gold heard a radio program about the moon landing that mentioned how Armstrong's heartbeat spiked to 160 bpm before he left Apollo 11 and then slowed again when he walked on the lunar surface. "It struck me then that this strong and yet peaceful sound could be the perfect rhythm for a song," Gold said.

The singer, who has long been fascinated by space, discovered a NASA recording of sounds derived from the plasma wave detector on the Voyager craft as it traveled through waves of electrons in ionized gas.

The waves aren't audible to the human ear, but because they occur at audio frequencies, "we can play the data through a loudspeaker and listen," space physicist Don Gurnett explained when NASA shared sounds of interstellar space last year. "The pitch and frequency tell us about the density of gas surrounding the spacecraft."

When Gold listened to the sounds, she heard a harmony between Venus and Armstrong's heartbeat. "Then 'Oh My Love' came into my mind and all of a sudden the song seemed absolutely complete," she said.

Have a listen to Gold's lilting tribute to space exploration below (and note: it may be challenging to differentiate the astronaut's soft heartbeat from the quiet whizzes and crackles of the space recordings).