My Curated List:
- Wedding song
- Azerbaijan S.S.R., bagpipes
- Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2, Prelude and Fugue in C., nN. 1.
- Mozart, The Magic Flute, Queen of the Night aria, no. 14
- Panpipes and drum (Peru)
- “Johnny B. Goode”
- Ch’in, “Flowing Streams”
- Court Gamelan, “Kinds of Flowers”
- Beethoven, Fifth Symphony, First Movement
- Shakuhachi, “Tsuru no Sugomori” (“Crane’s Nest,”)
Explanation
The first step in curating this list was to be clear about the purpose of the list. There are two purposes for the golden record – to communicate information about humanity to potential aliens, and to represent all of human culture (McDonald, n.d.). The first purpose is for an alien audience and the second is for a human audience. Curating for a human audience and representing all of human culture with only 10 tracks seems impossible, so I decided to only focus on aliens.
Aliens wouldn’t know country of origin of the tracks, so I ignored that information while listening and focused purely on including a variety of musical types. This includes vocal-only tracks, instrumental tracks, fast and slow tracks, loud and quiet tracks, and tracks for different musical purposes. For instance, I chose Johnny B. Goode because it’s meant purely for listening and entertainment while Azerbaijan bagpipes seems more ritualistic and cultural (though it’s not a guarantee aliens would interpret that way). I also ignored lyrics, except to include tracks with vocals, because aliens would be unlikely to be able to interpret spoken words.
Overall, the intent was to include a range of tracks that represented music for a broad range of purposes rather than culturally representative.
Reference
McDonald, Leigh. (Host). (n.d.). The Voyager Golden Record: Humanity’s message to the cosmos [Audio podcast]. In Twenty Thousand Hertz. https://www.20k.org/episodes/voyagergoldenrecord