What songs are on the ‘Voyager Golden Record’ that NASA sent into space?
For many reasons that are probably obvious to name, space has long been a focal point in music. For many, even the mere mention of the idea dredges up immediate associations with names like David Bowie and Brian Eno. However, there’s also a more deeply embedded fascination with the convergence between space and music, and what it might represent for all of humankind, as condensed into one NASA Voyager Golden Record.
As one of the industry’s best and most forward-thinking innovators, not to mention having revolutionised the space-music blend with scores like For All Mankind, Eno is perhaps best placed to explain the appeal. “Space is silent. It’s a vacuum,” he once explained. “In fact, we can’t really experience space directly at all: even those few humans who’ve been out there have done so inside precarious cocoons.”
The one thing that Eno alluded to that makes it the ideal basis for innovative creativity is that space, for most of us, is entirely untouchable. That means that, for all of humanity’s trials and tribulations on earth, there’s always a piece of space that feels inexplicably like a reflective surface, onto which we can project anything we like. For Bowie, and countless others, it’s an infinite basis for artistic identity and expression.
Perhaps this is why, when considering the context of music, when considering the idea of it being presented to someone or something that has no prior understanding of the thing itself or art in general, or, as others might call it, aliens, it becomes about how we define meaning itself and why it holds such importance to humans throughout our very frail and fragile experiences on earth.
What songs are on the Voyager Golden Record?
While there are countless arguments to be made for different pieces of music that may or may not accurately provide a glimpse into humanity’s adoration of the art form, NASA set out to venture as closely as possible with their Voyager Golden Record, including compositions from different artists, genres, and eras, from various cultures and traditions.
Equipped with the seemingly impossible task of choosing a mere selection of songs that best represent earth, NASA opted for an obvious approach with several legends from the classical period, including Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, alongside the pillar of rock ‘n’ roll, Chuck Berry’s ‘Johnny B Goode’, and Louis Armstrong’s ‘Melancholy Blues’. It also has several cultural and traditional snapshots, including a tribal song and mariachi track from Mexico.
Others include less traditional musical pieces, like sounds from Earth, comprising rain and animal noises, offering any extraterrestrial life an opportunity to explore the authentic experiences we hear and take for granted daily. Whether or not these recordings will ever be found remains uncertain, but at least, if they are, they provide a worthy introduction to the music that made humanity into what it is today, and maybe, they’ll understand it too.
Or perhaps more importantly, they’ll get to know our fixation with space and its possibilities as an artistic playground. As Eno put it: “That process of imagining is unanchored to experience, unconfined by any demand other than it be in some way true to our feelings. Making music about space, then, is sheer fantasy, or perhaps sheer metaphor.”
