Grant’s Task 8 – Golden Record Curation
https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540dgm/2021/10/27/task-8-golden-record-curation/
I chose Grant’s Task 8 because I know out of everyone in this class, we share the most similarities in our song selections. I was curious to find out what was his thought process in selecting the songs. Grant’s selection process was surprisingly very close to mine. We were both very subjective in our selections. He listened to all the songs and selected the most musically and geographically diverse set of songs, and this was influenced by his own liking towards the songs. We also both considered the extraterrestrial’s point of view. This was different from my selection experience because at first, I tried to be scientific about my choices by using an Excel sheet and creating a scoring method for the songs. However, the song choices did not speak out to me, and that’s when I decided to re-listen to all the songs and make choices according to how I felt toward the songs. The fact that we shared a 70% similarity in our selection suggests that we may also share similar ideas of what it means to be geographically and musically diverse, and we may even share similar tastes in music.
Grant offered a very detailed description of why he chose each song, which was very helpful in understanding his thought process. This was something that I did not do in my post, which I think I should have done, to offer offers a better insight into my choices. In his post, Grant quoted from Dr. Smith Rumsey’s (2017) video presentation where she asked the question, “what can we afford to lose?”. However, Grant did not attempt to answer the question since it was a difficult one to provide an objective answer to. However, at the end of his post, he did propose that in the future, a computer algorithm would probably pick out the songs.
I personally think music is something that cannot be replaced by machines. Music selected by machines might seem the most logical choice, but it may remain a question whether or not the choices would touch our hearts. Music is something that when played, touches our hearts and affects our individual emotions. Some music might give you the chills, some music might make your heart race, and some music might even make you think about memories from your life.
