The Method to my Madness:
Step 1: Learn about how some selections for the Golden Record were made based on their mathematical rather than purely musical properties (Ferris, 2017).
Step 2: Work out the important dates of the Voyager encounters in space from the days they were launched to the days their cameras were turned off for good.
Step 3: Turn the dates into numbers (a very inexact science combining the month and day number into one, like March 5 = 35, the day Voyager 1 saw Jupiter). I used NASA’s mission timeline for the information (NASA, n.d.).
Step 4: Covert the numbers into minutes and seconds.
Step 5: Match the closest song length to the calculated times in step 4. Another extremely inexact science that didn’t work entirely but was fun to try.
Essentially, I tried to use ‘math’ to match the songs from the record to Voyager 1 and 2’s most important events while they were within our solar system. I tried a few methods before settling on the one outlined above. I’m not such a great mathematician but the spirit was there and I hope Dr. Sagan won’t mind the mess I made.
References:
Ferris, T. (2017, August 20). How the Voyager Golden Record was made. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/voyager-golden-record-40th-anniversary-timothy-ferris
NASA. (n.d.). Voyager. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/timeline/#event-a-once-in-a-lifetime-alignment
