What is the Golden Record?

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched in 1977 and are currently the most distant human-made objects from Earth and the first to enter interstellar space. On board each Voyager is a Golden Record containing music, voice greetings, photos, as well as images etched onto copper and gold-plated discs encased in aluminum. These records serve as a kind of time capsule, carrying messages intended for any extraterrestrial civilization that might encounter them. The purpose of the records is to communicate an optimistic view of what life on Earth is like (Voyager Golden Record, 2025; Taylor, 2019).

My Selection Process

What can we afford to save? What can we afford to lose? How do we decide what is truly important? What is noise vs signal? These are all questions Abby Smith Rumsay (2017) asked about what is important when curating information that I kept in mind while completing this assignment.

The original creators of the Golden Record distilled the entire world’s musical heritage into just 27 tracks for the Golden Record. For this assignment, my task was to curate a smaller selection of ten songs from those original 27.

I aimed to honour the original intent by ensuring balanced representation across both of the original discs and by maintaining geographic diversity so that music from around the world would be included.

1. Geographical Map Representation: I began by plotting all the countries represented on a Google Map. This visual confirmed that the original selection already offered a fair geographical spread, which I wanted to preserve. View my map here.

2. Sorting by Country: Next, I identified countries that had multiple tracks represented, narrowing the list to 19 countries that required further curation.

3. Sorting by Continent: Then, I grouped the remaining tracks by continent. Six continents were represented (with the exception of Antarctica), so I decided to include between one and three tracks per continent.

4. Final Selection: Finally, I chose the songs with the most complex soundscapes, reasoning that such compositions might convey more information or simply because they resonated most with me. Such as Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 since it is referenced so much in pop culture.

In the end, my final curation included five tracks from each of the original two discs, maintaining both balance and diversity.

My Voyager Golden Record Curated Playlist

1. “Kinds of Flowers” recorded by Robert Brown
2. “Senegal Percussion” recorded by Charles Duvelle
3. “Morning Star” and “Devil Bird” recorded by Sandra LeBrun Holmes
4. “El Cascabel” performed by Lorenzo Barcelata and the Mariachi México
5. “Johnny B. Goode” written and performed by Chuck Berry
6. “The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du Printemps), Part II—The Sacrifice: VI. Sacrificial Dance (The Chosen One)” by Sacrificial Dance Columbia Symphony Orchestra, Igor Stravinsky, conductor
7. “Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Opus 67: I. Allegro Con Brio” by the Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, conductor
8. “Navajo Night Chant, Yeibichai Dance” recorded by Willard Rhodes
9. “The Fairie Round” performed by David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London
10. “Wedding Song” recorded by John Cohen

The Golden Record as Text and Technology

The Golden Record can be analyzed as both a text and a technology. It communicates meaning through multiple modes including sound (spoken greetings and music tracks), visual imagery, and even symbolic inscriptions on its cover that invite decoding. As a text, the record serves as a curated message to potential extraterrestrial life, combining music, natural sounds, and images to tell the story of life on Earth. Through these media, it conveys human identity, emotion, language, culture, and diversity.

At the same time, the Golden Record is a technology. It is a physical artifact designed to transmit and preserve information. Its copper and gold-plated construction represents a technological solution intended to endure for billions of years in space.

The Golden Record demonstrates the interdependence of text and technology: the message cannot exist without the medium that carries it, and the technology gains meaning through the human stories it contains. Together, its music, words, and images form a lasting testament to humanity’s desire to communicate across time and distance, which are all forms of how we communicate by constructing and sharing knowledge (Ong, 1982).

Reflection

I have no formal musical background so I have no professional opinions on what music would be most meaningful to represent humanity. For this assignment, my goal was to curate a playlist that offered a balanced representation of musical sounds from across the globe, based mostly on geographical location.

Technology has evolved significantly since 1977. If this project were conducted today, we could theoretically send all of humanity’s knowledge with the Voyager spacecrafts in digital form.

However, digital formats present challenges such as data degradation over time (Smith Rumsey, 1999). The original analog format of the Golden Records, on the other hand, could theoretically last as long as the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts remain intact, an estimated one billion years. Because Carl Sagan and his team were limited to about 90 minutes of audio, they were forced to make deliberate and meaningful choices about what best represented humanity. There is beauty in that simplicity. It’s also reassuring that the analog technology used ensures greater longevity than digital media, which cannot offer the same permanence (Taylor, 2019).

Bill Nye (United Nations, 2020) described the Golden Record project as an opportunity for humankind to reflect on itself. The Voyager spacecrafts and their Golden Records may one day be the only remaining evidence of human civilization. As Nye noted, the project sought to “capture the essence of human civilization and culture in all its forms” (United Nations, 2020), though from a largely American-centric perspective. Even if the records are never discovered or played, the project stands as a reminder of who we are, where we came from, and why we must care for the Earth and one another (United Nations, 2020).

I find the project deeply hopeful and inspiring. The idea that Carl Sagan and his team believed the Golden Records might one day be found and decoded captures a profound sense of optimism. Perhaps, someday, they will be.

AI disclaimer: ChatGPT was used to edit my writing for clarity, grammar. All of the final edits are my own.

Additional Project Links

My thought process spreadsheet

My Final Golden Voyager Playlist

References

Brown University. (2017, July 11). Abby Smith Rumsey: “Digital Memory: What Can We Afford to Lose?” [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBrahqg9ZMc

Music from Earth. (n.d.). NASA. https://www.20k.org/episodes/voyagergoldenrecord?rq=voyager

Ong, W.J. (2002). Chapter 1: The orality of language. In Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word (pp. 5-16). Routledge. (Original work published 1982). http://gw2jh3xr2c.search.serialssolutions.com/?sid=sersol&SS_jc=TC0000071162&title=Orality%20and%20literacy%20%3A%20the%20technologizing%20of%20the%20word

Smith Rumsey, A. (1999, February). Why digitize? Council on Library and Information Resources. Retrieved October 26, 2025. https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub80-smith/pub80-2/

Taylor, D. (Host). (2019, April). Voyager golden record [Audio podcast episode]. In Twenty thousand Hertz. Defacto Sound. https://www.20k.org/episodes/voyagergoldenrecord

United Nations. (2020, April 11). The Voyager Golden Record: A reminder that we are all connected [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5BG5nGmGFQ

Voyage – Songs from the Voyager Golden Record. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4D51474AB7BE5595

Voyager Golden Record. (2025, October 26). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record

 

Photo of record in featured image courtesy of Unsplash.com