In this linking assignment, I’m going to make connections and analyze differences between the reflections my classmate, James Martin, and I did for Task 8 – Golden Record curation. I was interested in reading James’ reflection and rationale for the curation because he is also a musician. In fact, last semester we were classmates in ETEC 524 and had some interesting discussions about music.

It was very interesting to read James’ rationales as we used different approaches for the selection of the 10 pieces. My selection was guided by the question of how music could provide information about the human experience so that the receptors can understand who we are. For this reason, I focused on selecting tracks that revealed information about our existence as time and space beings, transcendental awareness, the human body, emotions such as joy and fear, our social nature, our intellectual capacity, our creativity, and understanding of the universe. On the other hand, James’ approach was much more focused on the music itself, looking for ways of representing the widest range of musical possibilities. He was very thoughtful in ensuring his curation displayed the “widest possible combinations of diverse musical elements”. For this reason, he included unaccompanied vocal music, instrumental-only music, solo music, accompanied signing and playing, etc.

This contrast between our approaches helps me discover something very interesting. While selecting the pieces, it seems like I didn’t focus too much on the forms of music (I am surprised by this!), but rather on the non-musical content, it is capable of containing, expressing, and transferring. This makes it more obvious to me that music has different dimensions and functions. At one level, it is an art form that creates objects of perception that can be assembled in a variety of ways (hence the richness of music possibility and languages); at another level, it’s a communication tool with immense capacity of revealing implicit content of those who participate in the creation of it.

I believe the approach I followed reveals aspects of my character, as I tend to be very introspective and usually like to explore the deeper and unseen realms of something. However, I think James’ approach was also very skillful and coherent. It would have been very interesting to work as a team for this assignment, as both of our approaches combined could have resulted in a well-founded curation.