- Bagpipes (Azerbaijan)
- Fairie Round
- Wedding song
- Jaat Kahan Ho
- Brandenburg Concerto (First Movement)
- Morning Star & Devil Bird
- Men’s House Song
- Gavotte en rondeaux
- The Magic Flute (Queen of the Night aria)
- Melancholy Blues
When curating ten tracks from the Golden Record, I intentionally wanted to select tracks that were inclusive of the different parts of the world. While I know that should alien life-form come across this record, they wouldn’t really understand the different languages and cultures selected, the record itself is supposed to reflect us, on Earth. How can we put aside culture and lyrics when this project is intended to define our humanity, as per Timothy Ferris on the podcast, Twenty Thousand Hertz (Episode 65, 2019). The original record had some parameters that I also thought was useful during my own selection process. Sagan wanted tracks that conveyed a variety of emotions, and thus I chose ones that moved me like Melancholy Blues. Tracks such as ones from Bach and Beethoven contained mathematically principles that could be analyzed. While I could’ve included both, I only had space for one (In the face of limited space, indeed the question remained to be: What can I afford to keep?). I think what was said about keeping to the record format despite being able to digitize a lot more songs nowadays is important: what we choose to keep, this selection process itself, says something about who we are. As addressed many times in the podcast, we know there is a likely possibility that alien life form do not hear the way we do, or that they may hear certain frequencies and not others (which would change the overall song), or even misinterpret songs as a threat (though Ferris thinks the latter was highly unlikely). Since we can’t guarantee our music will be heard the way we intend, then the focus should be on creating a record that is representative of humans on Earth, and thus to me, the most important parameter was to be inclusive of various cultures and places.
References
Taylor, D. (Host). (2019). Voyager Golden Record (No. 65) [Audio podcast episode]. In Twenty Thousand Hertz. https://www.20k.org/episodes/voyagergoldenrecord
I love that you tried to represent a broad range of cultures, this is what I had intended to do with mine originally but then gave up on this approach as it truly seemed overwhelmingly impossible to me to accurately portray the incredible breadth of cultural diversity amongst humans. Interestingly, we still ended up with about half of the same songs.
Do I understand correctly that you then further curated based on the emotional weight of the songs? I think I also did this, although maybe subconsciously.
Hi Ryan, totally with you on how it was impossible to even attempt to portray the diverse cultures on Earth! I wonder what criteria we both subconsciously adhered to when selecting our songs…what is it about those certain ones that struck as as ‘representative’! I did end up picking songs that spoke to me…since it was a personal curation task, I figured my own feelings is a good place to start!