SALT LAKE CITY — If you are a total geek/nerd like the author, then you'll know that the universe of the Lord of the Rings was created by ancient gods and demigods performing music together in harmony.

Now you can hear the music of the creation of our own universe in a single simple sound file produced by a scientist at the University of Washington.

Using data from the European Space Agency's Plank Satellite mission, John Cramer was able to take temperature variations found in the cosmic microwave background radiation to detect sound waves propogating throughout the early universe and compress them down into a 20-second sound file that we can all listen to. It represents the time from about 380,000 years after the Big Bang to about 760,000 years.

How is this possible? It's very complex physically, but relatively easy to explain. Think of the sound made when you strike a big bowl or a bell. Something very similar happened with at the Big Bang, only on the grandest of all scales.

"Space-time itself is ringing when the universe is sufficiently small," Cramer said.

The bowl in this case is expanding at an insanely fast rate, changing the frequency of the vibrations as it goes along. That's why the sound gets lower and lower as you listen longer and longer.

Cramer has created a version of this sound more than once; back in 2003 he compiled the microwave background data and fed it into a program called Mathematica, which produced the sound. But the high level of detail translating into higher-range frequencies wasn't there.

More recent data from the Plank Satellite mission filled in those high-frequency gaps by detecting temperature variations of fractions of a degree, leading to the latest more complete version.

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Will it die with a bang or a whimper? Will the universe eventually collapse into a "Big Crunch," a fateful inverse of the "Big Bang"? Or will it expand forever until it leaves a void that is dark, lonely and astonishingly vast?

"The original sound waves were not temperature variations, though, but were real sound waves propagating around the universe," Cramer said.

Of course, there would be no way to hear the sound at the time. To begin with, the temperature of the universe at that time would have been several thousand degrees higher than it is now. And atoms were just beginning to form, meaning there would be nothing to breathe, stand on or generally help you stay alive.

Additionally, the sound waves would have been at far too low of a frequency to hear. Only through some clever mathematical manipulation, that is, boosting the frequency range by 100 septillion times, are we able to take the data and turn it into a sound we can recognize now.

"It was an interesting thing to do that I wanted to share," Cramer said. "It's another way to look at the work these people are doing."

There's no word on whether Cramer was inspired by Tolkein, Eru Illuvatar or any of the other ancient gods of Middle-Earth.

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