I am linking my Task 8 ‘Golden Record Curation’ to DeeDee Perrot’s. In selecting her songs DeeDee used 3 criteria. She selected based on mood, geographical location and whether a song was instrumental or contained vocals; aiming to have songs that represented a range of moods, diverse areas of the world and a list that had both instrumental and songs with vocals. When I embarked on this task I also thought about trying to select songs based on mood. I abandoned that approach because I could not divide the tracks into 10 distinct moods (which for reasons I can’t recall now was important to me). I appreciate how DeeDee used a particular methodology for discerning mood. Considering music based on pitch, timbre and rhythm seems somewhat of an objective measure, but I am not sure that intensity is anything other than subjective. It is interesting to consider how we have come to tacitly accept that certain moods are communicated via music, while at the same time understanding that our feelings towards music are very subjective. It seems that we are hardwired to sort and categorize; an instinct which probably propelled the development of language and text.

It’s not clear to me why DeeDee selected based on moods, geography and instrumental/vocals. What does a selection of music based on human moods, diverse locations and instrumental/ vocals communicate about the people that live on this planet? The same question could be asked about my selection process. I chose only tracks that included vocals and represented unique languages. My stated reason was that hearing a range of human voices and languages might provide beings from another planet some kind of insight into humans, but of course that is a very fanciful idea. Perhaps this task is a reminder that when we set out to communicate anything we do so with a large amount of trust and hope that whoever is receiving our communication will interpret it as we have intended, or at the very least will not ascribe ill intent on our communications. I can’t help but wonder if we were to post our song selections on Twitter and attempt to explain how we chose our tracks, how much opprobrium and scorn might we receive.

Reviewing DeeDee’s list, I realized that I missed a song with vocals when making my own selection; ‘Jaat Kahan Ho – India – Surshri.’ and I think, DeeDee incorrectly identified the  ‘Panpipes and drum song’ from Peru as a song with vocals.