This activity was a real thinker, not only for me but also my family. I listened to the Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast with my husband, and my brother-in-law and sister-in-law who were visiting from Toronto. We all had different opinions on which songs should be cut and which should be kept.

I thought about which criteria I should use to guide my curation over the following few days, and it was difficult to decide on one element to focus on. But as was explained in the Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast, some songs on the Golden Record were purposely chosen because of what they could possibly communicate (i.e., such as the mathematically driven Bach songs) but many songs were chosen because the project team enjoyed them (Taylor, 2019).

During this activity, I felt like I do not have the credentials or musical expertise to make a curated music list to represent humanity to extraterrestrial life. I love music but I know very little about music theory or history, and I do not play any musical instruments. I also considered that alien life may or may not be able to hear music, or hear sounds at the same frequency as humans, or enjoy the same musical sounds as I do. These two thoughts led me to the idea of picking most of the music randomly. In the end I chose eight songs randomly and two songs on purpose.

I started making my top 10 lists by cutting out some songs first. I cut out all the classical music songs except for Beethoven’s “Fifth Symphony” because to me it is the most recognizable and iconic classical song on the list. I am not a classical music fan and I think one classical song is enough. I also cut out “Dark was the Night” by Blind Willie Johnson and “Melancholy Blues” by Louis Armstrong because I did not want to over represent American music. I decided to keep “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry in my final list as the American representative. I also kept that song because it was the most modern song on the record. Lastly, I cut the panpipes and drum song from Peru because again I wanted to limit songs from each country to one and because there was already another panpipe song on the record.

Next, I listed and numbered the 15 songs that made it past the initial round of cuts in an Excel Spreadsheet and used an online random number generator to choose eight numbers. My final list of 10 is:

1. Java, court gamelan, “Kinds of Flowers,” recorded by Robert Brown. 4:43
2. Senegal, percussion, recorded by Charles Duvelle. 2:08
3. Zaire, Pygmy girls’ initiation song, recorded by Colin Turnbull. 0:56
4. New Guinea, men’s house song, recorded by Robert MacLennan. 1:20
5. Azerbaijan S.S.R., bagpipes, recorded by Radio Moscow. 2:30
6. Bulgaria, “Izlel je Delyo Hagdutin,” sung by Valya Balkanska. 4:59
7. Solomon Islands, panpipes, collected by the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Service. 1:12
8. India, raga, “Jaat Kahan Ho,” sung by Surshri Kesar Bai Kerkar. 3:30
9. “Johnny B. Goode,” written and performed by Chuck Berry. 2:38
10. Beethoven, Fifth Symphony, First Movement, the Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, conductor. 7:20

Spreadsheet I used to track my curation process.

Reference

Taylor, D. (Host). (2019, April). Voyager golden recordLinks to an external site. [Audio podcast episode]. In Twenty thousand hertz. Defacto Sound.