As Smith (1999) points out, when converting from analog signal to digital signal, some pieces of the information are inevitably lost. Similarly, the songs included on the Voyager golden record lost their higher frequencies in the compression process hoping to provide more meaningful information to the aliens (Twenty Thousand Hertz, n.d.). Facing the difficult choice of making more trade-offs, the following criteria are used to further reduce the track to 10 pieces of music aiming at the same goal of conveying more meaningful information.

Parameters and criteria:

– The record should send joyful and friendly messages, and avoid sad and angry messages in the tune and the lyrics

– Pretend that aliens understand human languages, the lyrics should be an introduction about Earth, not messages that one human wants to express to other humans

– Include tracks by different performers. If a performer has multiple tracks, choose the most joyful track

– Cover songs from different continents, about different genres, using different instruments as much as possible

 

The 10 tracks that I have chosen are:

Track 1: Brandenburg Concerto (First Movement)

Track 2: Kinds of Flowers

Track 3: Percussion (Senegal)

Track 8: Men’s House Song

Track 13: Panpipes and Drum (Peru)

Track 20: Night Chant

Track 21: The Fairie Round

Track 22: Panpipes (Solomon Islands)

Track 25: Flowing Streams

Track 27: String Quartet No.13 in B flat

 

References

Smith, A. (1999). Why digitize? Retrieved June 15, 2019, from Council on Library and Information Resources

Twenty Thousand Hertz. (n.d.) Voyager Golden Record. [Audio podcast episode]. Megaphone. https://cms.megaphone.fm/channel/20k?selected=TTH4214315391