Task 9: Network Assignment Using Golden Record Curation Quiz Data

Using Palladio, a data visualization tool from Stanford, we were able to map our Golden Record music choices and see how they connected across the class. Once the file loaded, it was actually pretty interesting to explore, though it also felt a bit strange to see something as personal as musical taste turned into dots and lines. It was fun to click around and look at patterns, but I quickly realized that the real challenge wasn’t in reading the visualization, it was in figuring out what it actually meant.

When I set the graph with “curator” as the source and “track” as the target, four main communities appeared. Each one showed a different kind of listening pattern. One cluster leaned toward Western classical pieces like Bach, Beethoven, and Stravinsky. These pieces are very structured and familiar. Another community grouped around rhythmic and percussive music, such as the Senegalese drum ensemble and Melanesian panpipes, where the beat and repetition take centre stage. A third community leaned into folk and vocal traditions from around the world; some example include the Navajo Night Chant, Jaat Kahan Ho, Flowing Streams. These are sounds that feel rooted in culture and storytelling. The last group focused on more on modern, emotional, and raw music, like Blind Willie Johnson and Chuck Berry, where the feeling seemed more important than form.

When I compared my own results to the class data, I noticed my selections (like the gamelan, panpipes, shakuhachi, and blues) sat somewhere between the folk–percussive and emotive–modern clusters. That felt right. In my notes, I had described those pieces as layered, alive, and human. I gave each track a score out of ten and wrote down three words to describe its sound or feeling, even for the ones I didn’t enjoy. Looking back, those small reflections helped me understand why I gravitated toward music that felt textured, rhythmic, or emotionally grounded. The Palladio map showed the overlaps between us, but it didn’t really show why we made those choices.

Something our professor said in his short Palladio tutorial video stuck with me. He mentioned being surprised that “Johnny B. Goode”wasn’t more popular. I was surprised too. It’s one of the most recognizable and energetic songs on the record. My guess is that, for many of us, the activity wasn’t just about picking what we liked personally, but about what we thought could represent humanity. Rock and roll might have felt too specific or too much about a certain time and culture. While other tracks, like the gamelan or panpipes, carried a kind of timelessness. Maybe that’s why a song we all know so well didn’t stand out in this context.

In the end, I think that’s what makes the visualization so interesting and also a bit incomplete. It shows who shared musical choices, but not what shaped those decisions, or what we felt listening to them. It captures the data, but not the stories behind it. In a way, it’s like the Golden Record itself: full of sound, yet traveling through silence. What it carries isn’t the music itself, but a trace of the people who chose to send it.