Selection:

  1. Bach – WTK 2, no 1, Glenn Gould
  2. Mozart – Queen of the night- Eda Moser
  3. Tchakrulo – Choir – Georgia
  4. Morning Star and Devil Bird- Australia
  5. Melancholy Blues-L Armstrong&HisHotSeven
  6. Johnny B Goode – Chuck Berry
  7. Fairie Round – cond David Munroe
  8. El Cascabel-Lorenzo Barcelata&the Mari
  9. Flowing Streams – China
  10. Beethoven 5th, part 1, Otto Klemperer

 

Rationale:

Since I did not recognize most songs by their names when I first looked at the Golden Record List, I decided to be scientific during my curation process. I started an Excel sheet that had the songs in a column, and some tags in the other six columns that included more neutral criteria such as “Is it representative of a culture?”, “Is it iconic in its era?”, “Has the piece withstood through time”,…etc. I put down a number one every time I think a song matched the criteria, and at the end added up all the numbers to see which songs received the highest score.

 

However, halfway through my selection process, I realized that even though this method seemed fair,  the outcome did not speak out to me. I was selecting the songs based on what I thought would be important for preserving Earth’s history. But what about from an alien’s point of view? As Traphagan (2021) points out, the disks were not developed with the idea that anyone would find them and contact Earth, but instead as something of a time capsule or message-in-a-bottle that might show evidence that we at least at one time existed as a civilization that could build spacecraft. I decided to change the angle of my selection, and I outlined some questions that I felt were important:

  1. Is this music something that I think shows our intelligence? For example, it demonstrates we can create different sounds using instruments that we craft out of many different kinds of materials.
  2. Can this music show we have a rich culture? For example, there are many different styles of music such as classical, jazz, opera, indigenous…etc.
  3. Can others enjoy listening to this music again and again? For example, this music has withstood through time, iconic in its era, known by many, and sounds beautiful or is catchy.

 

It’s worth noting the answers to all three questions were all subjective. As Dr. Smith Rumsey questioned in her speech “Digital Memory: What Can We Afford to Lose?”, about the kinds of content the publishers filtered out, I was in this task, in control of what ten songs were deemed worthy to represent the human civilization. I was the publisher who published pieces that others (peers from my class) potentially didn’t agree with. Even though Dr. Smith Rumsey mentioned that in the digital era where people have more access to even unpublished material, that we have “lost the filter”, in the case of the Golden Record, that wasn’t an option.

 

References:

Abby Smith Rumsey: “Digital Memory: What Can We Afford to Lose?”  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBrahqg9ZMc

Traphagan, J. W. (2021). Should We Lie to Extraterrestrials? A Critique of the Voyager Golden Records. Space Policy, 57. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.spacepol.2021.101440