I’ve chosen to link with Katie Naish’s post:
First off, I really appreciate the layout of her blog. While I’ve struggled with other blogs to identify the author anywhere in the blog, Katie’s seems to have that naturally in her blog’s layout. With her logo that includes part of her name as well as an image that I could assume is meaningful to her (the stem of flowers) which appears on the side menu no matter where you go on her blog. The ease of navigation that her menu choices provides is also better than mine, in my opinion, and very user friendly. This is my first blog, but I wonder if Katie has had more experience either building or at least navigating through more blogs.
For this task, she starts off with the image of the golden record, which is visually appealing, and shows her better us of different forms of text in her blog. Why haven’t I thought about using more visuals in my blog? The rest of her post is more similar to mine, and is written text heavy.
Katie talks about the overwhelming task of trying to curate a fully representative sound track that would both represent all facets of humanity, while also being aware of the potential “messages” that we are sending to extra-terrestrials. This is something that the original curators where aware of, and attempting to find different cultures, peoples, and geographic locations that could be represented on the record, but they also spoke about how they couldn’t even begin to think about how the music or lyrics could possibly be interpreted if it was even possible to be ‘hear’ by the other life forms, which is why they chose some music specifically for it’s mathematical properties over anything else (MacDonald, 2019). Katie is clear that she often picked songs that were familiar to her, which would therefore represent her experiences more, and any other songs chosen were more for their emotional response than anything else. I chose songs based on representation of cultures (thinking more about the people on earth and how they would feel as opposed to who might be listening to in 40,000 years), as well as some with lyrics and some without in an attempt to have the widest variety of sounds possible.
Yet with those differences in approach, we chose the same 5 out of the 10 possible, although for seemingly different purposes. Katie often refers to the emotions evoked in her by the songs, but I would wonder if a different culture would have the same emotions? For example, colour is used by different cultures in almost exactly the opposite ways (mourning vs celebration). Would the emotions behind sounds also be culturally influenced? This is something that I’m curious about. But not matter what, we would have no idea if the extra-terrestrials would even be able to hear in the frequencies that our music is recorded in, so would emotions be the most powerful tool to select by.
References:
McDonald, L. (Executive Producer). (2019-present). Voyager Golden Record [Audio podcast]. Defacto Sound. https://www.20k.org/episodes/voyagergoldenrecord