Here are the 10 pieces that I would pick to include on the Golden Record:

  1. Ugam – Azerbaijan Bagpipes
  2. Mozart – Queen of the night – Eda Moser
  3. Men’s house song – Papua New Guinea
  4. Sacrificial dance-comp&cond Stravinsky
  5. Melancholy Blues – L Armstrong & HisHotSeven
  6. Johnny B Goode – Chuck Berry
  7. Fairie Round – cond David Munroe
  8. Flowing Streams – China
  9. Bach, Brandenburg, no 2, part 1
  10. Greetings from Earth

WOW. It was hard to pick 10 out of 27 soundtracks from the Voyager’s Golden Record. Here are the questions that came to mind while listening to the 27 soundtracks and finding 10 to save.

  1. Who am I making this album for?
  2. What is the purpose of having a more condensed list of soundtracks?

It is difficult to explain why each piece was chosen, but I have reasons why I designed my album as above. While curating this list, I considered saving and sharing music made by musicians worldwide. The podcast Twenty Thousand Hertz mentioned a few times that we aren’t sure what extraterrestrial beings’ perception of music or sound is (2019). Considering that my curated album has a wide range of pitches and tones, music produced by instruments, and sung melodies, I hope extraterrestrial beings can still appreciate this. I played classical music when I was younger and always admired how Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, and other musicians composed their pieces. If this playlist is for future generations, I would like listeners to be reminded of how music came to be and of the musical geniuses that were alive before our time. I want others to be in awe of what they are listening to. If extraterrestrial beings can hear the same pitches as humans, they can see, hear, and feel the multitude of talents collected from different centuries.

If I could curate another album of 10 soundtracks, I would have one solely with chants and nature-like sounds from around the world. This will allow listeners to hear a vast array of sounds and voices. They can get a feeling of how animals communicate or the emotions of the chants and the messages that they convey. If my album consists of a combination of melodies and chanting, I think future generations or extraterrestrial beings might be confused with all the different sounds they are hearing.

I found it eye-opening as Rumsey insisted that digitizing is not preserving (1999). Perhaps this is more true for printed documents, like the original Bible or an original version of a painting from Piccaso. I think digitizing music is a form of preserving, especially the first piece of recording. Without the first recording or any recording of Mozart’s work, how does anyone know he composed it? Not everyone can read sheet music, so the way to pass on his legendary pieces is through recording. And through these recordings, these pieces are still “with” us today. The tenth soundtrack, Greetings from Earth, records many languages. Throughout the history of mankind, there might have been dialects that disappeared. If digitizing existed, these dialects could be studied and brought back.

Reference:

Smith Rumsey, A. (1999, February). Why digitize?. Council on Library and Information Resources. Retrieved August 12, 2022.

Taylor, D. (Host). (2019, April). Voyager golden record. [Audio podcast episode]. In Twenty thousand hertz. Defacto Sound.