The 10 pieces I picked are:
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- Track 5: Bach, Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F. First Movement, Munich Bach Orchestra, Karl Richter, conductor. 4:40
- Track 6: Java, court gamelan, “Kinds of Flowers,” recorded by Robert Brown. 4:43
- Track 8: Zaire, Pygmy girls’ initiation song, recorded by Colin Turnbull. 0:56
- Track 9: Australia, Aborigine songs, “Morning Star” and “Devil Bird,” recorded by Sandra LeBrun Holmes. 1:26
- Track 10: Mexico, “El Cascabel,” performed by Lorenzo Barcelata and the Mariachi México. 3:14
- Track 11: “Johnny B. Goode,” written and performed by Chuck Berry. 2:38
- Track 15: Mozart, The Magic Flute, Queen of the Night aria, no. 14. Edda Moser, soprano. Bavarian State Opera, Munich, Wolfgang Sawallisch, conductor. 2:55
- Track 22: Beethoven, Fifth Symphony, First Movement, the Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, conductor. 7:20
- Track 24: Navajo Indians, Night Chant, recorded by Willard Rhodes. 0:57
- Track 29: India, raga, “Jaat Kahan Ho,” sung by Surshri Kesar Bai Kerkar. 3:30
Parameters
This was a challenging activity, because along the lines of Smith Rumsey’s (2017) caution that “[w]e actually don’t know the value of anything until way in the future because its actual meaning is determined by events in context that we don’t know about” (Brown University, 2017), I also cannot imagine what may matter in the context of extraterrestrial life forms experiencing the Golden Record. That said, here were my considerations:
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- Must not have references to fighting amongst ourselves or unjust: I loved watching reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation as a child, and one of my takeaways was that extraterrestrial life would not be interested in contacting us until we’ve figured out how to be good as individuals, to one another, and as a species. This also makes me think back to Smith Rumsey’s (2017) question of what we “really want to be known by” (Brown University, 2017). I crossed out tracks 16, 23, 27, and 30.
- Have voices of people: I’m hoping that songs with voices would help extraterrestrial life forms understand that these pieces were produced by people. This added eight tracks to my list (tracks 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 15, 24, 29).
- Have mathematical foundation: Ferris made sure to include “music that would make sense even if we were just mathematically analyzing it” (Taylor, 2019), in case the life forms have different or no means of hearing. The examples Ferris gave were Bach and Beethoven, so I included tracks 5 and 22.
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
Taylor, D. (2019, April 22). Voyager Golden Record [Audio podcast episode]. In Twenty Thousand Hertz. https://www.20k.org/episodes/voyagergoldenrecord