This week’s task involved curating 10 musical tracks from the original 27 that were included on the Voyager Golden Record. Listed below are the tracks that I’ve selected:
- Track 3: Cengunmé – also known as Senegal percussion (NASA, n.d.).
- Track 4: Pygmy Girls’ Initiation Song – also known as the Alima Song, performed by Indigenous peoples in the Congo Rainforest (Taylor, 2019)
- Track 5: Australia Barnumbirr (Morning Star) and Moikoi Song – Two Aborgine songs from Australia (Taylor, 2019). Contrary to what’s listed on the NASA website (n.d.) , Gorman (2013) suggests that it is “Moikoi Song”, not “Devil Bird”, that is actually on the Voyager Record.
- Track 6: El Cascabel – a Mariachi song (Taylor, 2019).
- Track 8: Mariuamangɨ – A traditional New Guinea folk song (Taylor, 2019), also known as “men’s house song” (NASA, n.d.).
- Track 9: Sokaku-Reibo (Depicting the Cranes in Their Nest) – A Japanese folk song (Taylor, 2019), also known as “Tsuru No Sugomori” or “Crane’s Nest” (NASA, n.d.).
- Track 20: Night Chant – Also known as “Yeibichai Dance” (Taylor, 2019), performed by Navajo Indians (NASA, n.d.).
- Track 22: Naranaratana Kookokoo (The Cry of the Megapode Bird) – From the Solomon Islands (Taylor, 2019), also known as “Panpipes” (NASA, n.d.).
- Track 25: Jaat Kahan Ho – From India (Taylor, 2019)
- Track 26: Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground – A blues song recorded by Blind Willie Johnson (NASA, n.d.).
Reflection
When approaching this task, I was reminded of Dr. Smith Rumsey’s recorded talk at Brown University (2017), which addresses the preservation of digital information in the face of surplus information and economical limitations. Something that stuck with me during her talk was her point that the goals of preservation should be to “create an honest record” (Brown University, 2017, 00:34:00). Specifically, Smith Rumsey speaks to Carter Woodson’s work of maintaining a community archive of African-American materials to ensure that an accurate cultural narrative was not being misrepresented through scholarly institutions (Brown University, 2017, 00:27:00).
This gave me pause to consider the colonial erasure of Indigenous cultures and knowledge systems and it’s replacement with Eurocentric/Western knowledge systems and narratives. Addressing my own context within Canada, forms of erasure were enacted and perpetuated through the Canadian residential school system, which contributed to what Tuck & Gaztambide-Fernández (2013) describes as a “curricular project of replacement, which aims to vanish Indigenous peoples and replace them with settlers” (p. 73).
With this in mind, I’ve tried to take a reparative approach to my curation of the Golden Record so that erasure of historically underrepresented cultures is not further perpetuated. As such, I decided to decenter and exclude the white, European composers (i.e., Bach, Mozart, Beethoven) found on the original record. I then prioritized the inclusion of compositions originating in Indigenous communities (i.e. Aboriginal Australians, Congo Pygmy Peoples, Navajo Indians). From there, I attempted to capture a wide range of cultural narratives that have been informed by or impacted in some way by settler colonialism and oppression.
References
Brown University. (2017, July 11). Abby Smith Rumsey: “Digital memory: What can we afford to lose?” [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/FBrahqg9ZMc
Gorman, A. (2013). Beyond the morning star: the real tale of the Voyagers’ Aboriginal music. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/beyond-the-morning-star-the-real-tale-of-the-voyagers-aboriginal-music-18288
NASA. (n.d.). Voyager – music on the golden record. NASA. Retrieved March 3, 2023 from https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/whats-on-the-record/music/
Taylor, D. (Host). (2019, April). Voyager golden record. [Audio podcast episode]. In Twenty thousand hertz. Defacto Sound. https://www.20k.org/episodes/voyagergoldenrecord?rq=voyager
Tuck, E., & Gaztambide-Fernández, R. A. (2013). Curriculum, replacement, and settler futurity. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 29(1), 72- 89. https://go.exlibris.link/3Rxs1XGz
Hi Christopher,
I really appreciate your decisions in curating your list. A thoughtful and very different perspective that I took, by de-colonizing the list. Thank you for a very thought provoking and personal perspective, and one that is very different from mine.
Hi Chris,
I appreciate the thought you put behind choosing your 10 songs. While I did not exclude European composers, I decided my selections based on the representation of cultures and chose my choices based on the mood the songs elicited. Music can evoke emotion, and the last thing I wanted was music that could be misconstrued as aggressive or combative, giving the wrong impression of who we are as Earthlings.