List of Songs chosen from the Golden Record:
- Men’s House Song
- Gavotte en rondeaux
- The Magic Flute
- Panpipes and Drum
- Melancholy Blues
- Rite of Spring
- Fifth Symphony
- Night Chant
- The Fairie Round
- Wedding Song
What a fascinating module and experience in both prioritizing artifacts for digitization and navigating my own values surrounding what I see as more important. It’s evident from the start that the full Golden Record selections cover the ethnic diversity found across human civilization’s existence. I guided my selection then by focusing less on diversity and cultural variety and more on the mood and complexity presented.
My selection includes rather intense and musically complex compositions, such as Bach’s Gavotte en Rondeau, and the happier, much simpler “Wedding Song”. The mediums of meaning transmission varying from vocal chords to string sections of a symphony. The variance of emotional expression found within my selection encapsulates major themes of the dynamic experience of what it feels like to be human and how it’s expressed in music. If the meaning of what it is to be human is changed by the digitization of our artifacts, at least what I would preserve gives a glimpse into the dynamic living of pre-digitization.