There are 27 pieces of music included on the Voyager Golden Record. For this activity, we were asked to review the record’s musical contents and curate the 27 pieces down to 10.

You can listen to all 27 pieces here: Voyager Golden Record

This task seemed easy at first, but the more that I listened to each song and the more that I read about the reasoning behind them being chosen, it became quite complex and challenging. To add to this was my own personal struggle of understanding why these songs were chosen when the purpose of the Golden Record was “to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth.” (Nasa) 

After listening to all the songs numerous times each, I couldn’t help but feel that there was a lack of diversity amongst them. Yes there are songs from across the globe and the list is exceptional in many ways, but there is also an overwhelming number of western songs than those from other countries. 

I couldn’t also help but think about Carl Sagan and the team that was chosen to help create this record. Again, made up of a group of people who all live in the same part of the world. This fact alone made it quite challenging to understand that this record is truly portraying the diversity of life and culture on Earth. Of course, the curators were limited to some of the music they wanted as they needed to obtain a physical recording of each song. This could lead one to say that they chose certain songs based on ease of access rather than true representation – but then again, we can’t be certain as we weren’t there. 

Dr. Abby Smith Rumsey talked about false narratives or false pasts and how we often tell people what they want to hear and what makes sense of the present age. The songs on this list don’t tell the entire history of our Earth, the hurt, pain, wars, and death that occurred, but I think that’s okay. When you meet someone for the first time, you don’t tell them your worst experiences, rather you “make a good first impression,” and I think that’s what the Golden Record was aiming for. When Dr. Smith Rumsey discussed how we need to collect information for the future, she mentioned that it’s incredibly important that we are taking all viewpoints, all experiences, and creating a network of “information archives.” When I look at the team that curated the songs for the Golden Record, I do not see all viewpoints and all experiences, but rather the opinions of a select group of similar people. 

I think if there was to be a Golden Record 2.0, the group of people selected to curate would be vastly different and the songs chosen would represent a better portrayal of life and culture on Earth, along with the evolution of how we obtain and evaluate information and texts today. One of Dr. Smith Rumsey’s quotes really sat with me, “We do not add text to the technology, the texts are the technology.” After reading last week about The New London Group’s multiliteracies and how all texts are multimodal, it makes sense to say that text is the technology because the way we represent information is more than just the surface. Representation of information and the ways in which we collect that information is becoming more diverse. In fact, The New London Group states that such multiliteracies “are actually quite dynamic in the way they interact with cultural contexts” (Dobson & Willinsky, 2009). 

This moves me toward my reasoning for how I chose my curated list of 10 songs. Based upon using multiliteracies, I broke down the layers and made two groups; Non-verbal or Audio Design and Verbal or Linguistic Design. You can click on each song to listen to it. 

Non-verbal or Audio Design:

• Japan, shakuhachi, “Tsuru No Sugomori” (“Crane’s Nest,”) performed by Goro Yamaguchi. 4:51
• Peru, panpipes and drum, collected by Casa de la Cultura, Lima. 0:52
• “Melancholy Blues,” performed by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Seven. 3:05
• Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2, Prelude and Fugue in C, No.1. Glenn Gould, piano. 4:48\

I chose the above songs for a few reasons. Firstly, I wanted to showcase a variety of musical instruments; wind, percussion, strings, etc. and how they represent such unique sounds and rhythms from around the world. Secondly, in the podcast, Twenty Thousand Hertz, Tim Ferris discussed the reasoning behind including the songs of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart. He said he “was concerned to represent some music that has strong mathematical foundations because we might well be communicating with creatures who don’t have hearing or don’t have hearing in the range or whose timescale is different so that our rhythms might not make sense.” It is for this reason that I included a composition from Bach (Non-verbal) and Mozart (Verbal). 

Verbal or Linguistic Design:

• Zaire, Pygmy girls’ initiation song, recorded by Colin Turnbull. 0:56
• Mozart, The Magic Flute, Queen of the Night aria, no. 14. Edda Moser, soprano. Bavarian State Opera, Munich, Wolfgang Sawallisch, conductor. 2:55
• Georgian S.S.R., chorus, “Tchakrulo,” collected by Radio Moscow. 2:18
• Peru, wedding song, recorded by John Cohen. 0:38
• Navajo Indians, Night Chant, recorded by Willard Rhodes. 0:57
• India, raga, “Jaat Kahan Ho,” sung by Surshri Kesar Bai Kerkar. 3:30

I enjoyed almost all of the songs on the record that provided linguistic characteristics. I wanted to ensure I was including strong female voices which were my main reason for choosing the Peru Wedding Song, Pygmy girls’ initiation song, and Mozart’s aria. Each of these songs represents not only beautiful voices but allows the listener to see the range and emotion that a human voice can portray. The other two songs listed here were chosen to represent the opposite; a strong male voice or collective male voices. I think these songs represent power, strength, vulnerability, pain, and joy, and if aliens can understand emotion even at the fraction that we as humans do, I believe these songs will make a lasting, well-received, impression. 

References:

Dobson, T. M., & Willinsky, J. (2009). Digital literacy. (pp. 286-312) Cambridge University Press.

McDonald, L. (2019). Twenty Thousand Hertz, #65 Voyager Golden Record. Retrieved from https://www.20k.org/episodes/voyagergoldenrecord

Nasa. (n.d) Voyager-The Golden Record. https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/