the Sun as musician

Very interesting stuff in the new issue of Scientific American, titled
Magnificent Cosmos. An article on new discoveries about the Sun talks
about how the Sun has moving sound waves inside it that cause the whole
star to throb with the sound waves pulsations..."These oscillations,
which can be tens of kilometers high and travel a few hundred meters per
second, arise from sounds that course through the solar interior. The
sounds are trapped inside the sun; they cannot propagate through the
near vacuum of space.(Even if they could reach Earth, they are too low
for human hearing.) Nevertheless, when these sounds strike the Sun's
surface and rebound back down, they disturb the gases there, causing them
to rise and fall, slowly and rhythmically, with a period of about 5
minutes..." then, "The surface oscillations are the combined effect of
about 10 million separate notes-each of which has a unique path of
propagation and samples a well defined section inside the Sun. So to
trace the star's physical landscape all the way through...we must
determine the precise pitch of all the notes." Comments about this
fascinating discovery will be well appreciated....Hstick