Voyager Golden Record

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golden record

Where are they now.

  • frequently asked questions
  • Q&A with Ed Stone

What are the contents of the Golden Record?

The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University, et. al. Dr. Sagan and his associates assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind and thunder, birds, whales, and other animals. To this they added musical selections from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings from Earth-people in fifty-five languages, and printed messages from President Carter and U.N. Secretary General Waldheim.

"The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space."

Each record is encased in a protective aluminum jacket, together with a cartridge and a needle. Instructions, in symbolic language, explain the origin of the spacecraft and indicate how the record is to be played. The 115 images are encoded in analog form.

The remainder of the record is in audio, designed to be played at 16-2/3 revolutions per minute. It contains the spoken greetings , beginning with Akkadian, which was spoken in Sumer about six thousand years ago, and ending with Wu, a modern Chinese dialect. Following the section on the sounds of Earth , there is an eclectic 90-minute selection of music , including both Eastern and Western classics and a variety of ethnic music. Once the Voyager spacecraft leave the solar system (by 1990, both will be beyond the orbit of Pluto), they will find themselves in empty space. It will be forty thousand years before they make a close approach to any other planetary system. As Carl Sagan has noted, "The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet."

The definitive work about the Voyager record is "Murmurs of Earth" by Executive Director, Carl Sagan, Technical Director, Frank Drake, Creative Director, Ann Druyan, Producer, Timothy Ferris, Designer, Jon Lomberg, and Greetings Organizer, Linda Salzman. Basically, this book is the story behind the creation of the record, and includes a full list of everything on the record. "Murmurs of Earth", originally published in 1978, was reissued in 1992 by Warner News Media with a CD-ROM that replicates the Voyager record. Unfortunately, this book is now out of print, but it is worth the effort to try and find a used copy or browse through a library copy.

bach voyager golden record

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bach voyager golden record

Bach FAQ 105

Is a Golden Record with Music of Bach in Spaceship Voyager 1 + Voyager 2 on It's Way Through Outer Space?

The 100 most important Bach FAQ.

To the point: yes!

bach voyager golden record

One of the twins Voyager 1 and Voyager 2: The golden record, Bach, and a hello on the move in space.

If you did not mean the music of Johann Sebastian

Bach on the Golden Record on it's way to E.T. But

the story, when JSB 2012 almost got a gold record,

then learn more on this topic with one click here .

Space Ship Voyager or Space Probe Voyager? Facts About the "Interstellar Mindful Double Lotti"!

They are no real spaceships at all. Space probes sounds better. And space probes are especially correct. Spaceships that would be simply ... wrong. But because it's all here related to the hoped-for contact with aliens, that is, with extraterrestrials, for instance, E.T. and buddies, we simply leave spaceship once. In 1977, both space probes were shot into the universe at intervals of 16 days. From Cape Canaveral in Florida, USA . And on a Titan-Centaur Rocket . Clear and logical: not both on the same trajectory. You actually want to know what the Double Lotti is? Click here .

bach voyager golden record

This is it, the rocket that Bach, together with other musicians in Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, shot into the depth of the universe. So to speak. The golden record – the Golden Record – on its way to E.T. and Co.!

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Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, the Golden Record and an Extraordinary Success

Today the mission of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 is considered one of NASA's greatest successes because the life expectancy of both missiles has already been multiplied and they are still sending regular data from space to earth. At the same time, it is the man-made object that moved farthest from the earth. And it will stay that way. A golden record in it with Bach on it. and more.

bach voyager golden record

Tadaa, the Golden Record. From copper with Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and many other musicians. Plus of course with a coating of gold.

Mission Voyager 1 + 2 – Music for Aliens: Just from Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven?

First, Voyager  1 + 2 were named ... Mariner 11 and Mariner 12. The considerations for building Voyager already began in the middle of the 1960s. Both probes had no particular focus on research. They wanted to explore Jupiter and Saturn just a little more, the basic values of these planets and the moons and the rings around them, magnetic fields, and in particular they were more interested in the two moons Io  and Titan . The next destination for Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 on their journey then were Uranus as well as Neptune and later finally the outermost regions of our solar system. And beyond. First, they were considered an extension of the Mariner project.

The diameter of Voyager 1 and, of course, that of Voyager 2 is 1.80 meters (... that's why it is not a spaceship, too) and the space probes weighed some 800 kilograms each, and they do so today. With the expanded parabolic antenna the size doubles to a proud 3.60 meters.

Voyager Golden Record: A Kind Hello in 55 Languages From Our World to Theirs. What Else? Heavenly Music, of Course.

It is from copper, our golden record to the nice little Martians . So they called, when we still thought, Mars might be populated. However, in order to call the record a golden record, more precisely the Golden Record, it was covered with gold for protection against rust. On the front is a map and, of course, a manual, a kind of " Google Maps for E.T.", so E.T. is able to find us one day.

© Photo/Source/License : von English: by Eva Rinaldi Celebrity and Live Music Photographer (Flickr) [ CC BY-SA 2.0 ],  via Wikimedia Commons

bach voyager golden record

And what, if they hate Bach, Beethoven and Mozart? And what if they are searching for new food already a long time? They may not only be great pyramid constructors. Who of those extraterrestrial is probably getting the first gold record?

Whatever Language the Aliens Are Speaking: Almost Everything Is "Covered" – That Is Simply Cosmically Cool

Let us leave aside, whether it really makes interstellar sense to wish to be found by other intellectuals. It would certainly be useful if we were just sort of the same technical and scientific level. That means, if about the same time, some tens of billions of years, there has been developed one more such earth. There, too, the dinosaurs have died. Intelligence has evolved. And that in the last 1,000 years even dramatically. And they would finally be capable to look for us , that is to say for our Earth. But these aliens might be 20 years ahead of us after all. Let us imagine: these beings are attracted to Voyager 1 or Voyager 2.

From there, they are now heading for Earth through space – at this time you are flying let's call the planet  K-Pax back and forth between the "Earth" there and a "terraformed moon" and is proud of having changed a cold, inhospitable stone desert into a lovely planet. On which you can relocate if you have to escape from the collapsing home planet, on which it was not even possible to keep the CO² emissions on the previous year's level *. Worldwide – I mean all over the planet.

* At this point, we ignore the fact that a year there may be a multiple of our earth year - but this is getting sort of absurd now.

So, "our" extraterrestrials catch one of our probes. And now? Now, we really cover the highest probabilities of demand out there with many, many languages of our earth people. It goes without saying that only native speakers – that is to say, people who speak in their own, not a learned language – welcome E.T. in space. And you completely couldn't care less, whether they rather speak English or Greek, Cantonese or Akkadian , Russian or Thai, Arabic or Burmese or simply some more languages.

© Photo/Source/License: von English: by Eva Rinaldi Celebrity and LiveMusic Photographer (Flickr) [ CC BY-SA 2.0 ], via Wikimedia Commons

bach voyager golden record

For all optimists: please let us remember! This can also could go down the drain (... in German: go into your pants). Namely, if he – the nice guy above – fishes for one of the Golden Records: Darth Vader, much worse than just an intergalactic oops!

The Golden Record in the Depths of the Universe: At Least One of 55 Languages ​​Should Extraterrestrials Know!

What is also interesting is what we treat them with, if a 300-year-old skunk-like, grunting, 15 feet tall creature – on the road in space in search of raw materials – decipher our message. At least, it is not as dull as to decipher hieroglyphs in an ancient pyramid: because if yo u have accomplished that quickly then there is only a lot of papyrus left in the same language as the original challenge. Nope, we're doing that much more exciting than the ancient Egyptians. Because, if they find our message in space – that is to say on the Golden Record – the (perhaps) small alien has to decipher all 55 different languages. But at least he can start with one font, with which he can finally continue working. The Chinese, Arabic and Canary characters can then be decoded with even greater fun and even greater tension. If one had a big  interstellar  fun with their first deciphered messages.

© Photo/Source/License:  von Tracy [ CC BY-SA 2.0 ], via Wikimedia Commons

bach voyager golden record

Voyager captured. Golden record found. 55 Greetings deciphered and down with a delegation to our Earth. We did invite and still invite them. And when they all come finally, we are probably really overstrained: E.T.? This is in the picture isn't E.T. at all. Because E.T. was really amiable, looked markedly cute, but we will certainly meet E.T. never – ever – again. He still suffers from his experience with us humans.

Music and Greetings. Not Just Bach, Mozart and Beethoven Just Do – Music Alone Is Not Universal Enough!

So, if Yoda and Co. manage to break through to the individual greetings than he will certainly be impressed by our extraordinary cordiality. The fact that we can also be very different from "being nice", we slaughter this year in 20 wars and kill each other in about 45 violent clashes – we leave the smaller conflicts, around 350 aside – is what we do not report about initially Nobody would look for a divorce attorney right at the wedding during the celebration. Perhaps everything inter galactically is all right, too.

© Photo/Source/License: By Pollack man34 (Own work) [ CC BY-SA 3.0 ], via Wikimedia Commons

bach voyager golden record

"His   grammar  doing differently is much!" We would not have had to pay so much attention to our greetings: Yoda, he is simply just a cool-headed guy.

bach voyager golden record

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And What Kind of Sayings Did We Sent Out? With Voyager 1 + Voyager 2 – as We, All Can Perform More Than Just Music

In Sumerian , we state on the Golden Record: "May all be healthy". This is intergalactically great and you can, I believe, understand that statement everywhere and in all solar systems very well. Plus the statement "... we come in friendship", is nice, if you deciphered it. And "peace and luck to you all" is also a wonderful gesture.

"Hello how are you?" sounds like a pure American welcome. But it does not come from there: it is very polite, but it is the result when a Jedi has decoded the Cantonese on the Golden Record. Fun is the Russian text: "I welcome you". This is what I will say next time when I visit our friends. "We would like to meet you ..." is what you can read after you decoded Arabic quickly, although we do not know whether we count as food.

"Good day everyone." ... this is a warm hello, isn't it? Almost as if we were friends already. However, not quite trustworthy is Wikipedia, with the witty saying of the ... no, I do not say, who said this ... "Good night, ladies and gentlemen, farewell and goodbye, the next time."

In Punjabi , we are looking forward to welcoming the aliens, even though we visit them . And in Latin, we make the really cool statement: "We bring peace to the stars". We. We of all creatures . We do not even manage to get along with the neighbors peacefully. "Kind regards to all" is, on the other hand, a super-duper cool execution of the German world community. Shrewdly formulated, we do not care how many greens gnomes they are. billions, trillions, sextillions or just 500 – "all" is simply "all". Very, really very diplomatic. However, a little bit more down this page it's even getting more exciting. Plus much more amusing.

© Photo/Source/License: By hyku [ CC BY 2.0 ], via Wikimedia Commons

bach voyager golden record

Do we really want to get to know them? Don't we prefer to develop a few thousand more years? But one thing is what we already guess: Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, and Co. will excite and fascinate him.

bach voyager golden record

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The Golden Record in Voyager 1 + 2 – We Do Not just Want to Welcome Strange Intelligence, We Want to Inspire Them !

More seriously the Vietnamese are, from there the friendly greetings, therefore, are highlighted honest. The Turks have decided to welcome just Turkish-speaking marsians and even one of them must have an IQ of at least 103 to understand their message. "Congratulations" send the Italians, and in Zulu, we wish distant intelligence a long life, although perhaps that is exactly what they might not want. Because living for 1,200 years might become boring one day.

Somewhere in Africa "Sotho" is spoken and there they have already decided that you look up to our counterpart in the universe or from above on them: they go "... salute you, you great." In Mandarin-Chinese, we are polite and diplomatic, because "... we hope everyone is doing well, and we think of all of you". And we even ask Chewbacca to come and visit us". However – so much courtesy just has to be – "... only if you have time.

In "Amoy" we are already friends and we are dying to know if they already have eaten". Plus they ask, just to say hello for a drink, but only if they have time (... slight changes of the text, author's comment). The Hungarians send greetings just to "Frogs", which can speak Hungarian and so do the 1.4 percent who speak Telugu . We deceive our congeners in the universe in English, in which we try to convince them, only the children were looking forward to their visit. No word of salutation from the adults: "Hello from the children of planet Earth".

And with all these many cordial greetings, creatures that are perhaps 10,000 years ahead of us with their intelligence, technology, and communication can have a really great impression of us. No, and still not really serious: precisely, for this reason, the greetings are upgraded with music and garnished with further intelligent.

© Photo/Source/License: von William Tung [ CC BY-SA 2.0 ], via Wikimedia Commons

bach voyager golden record

Well ... now the question whether they already had dinner makes sense. But we can no longer get back the probes. And not even the Golden Record in Voyager 1 and Voyager 2.

A small warning for all kids : an essay, a home assignment or a speech is what I might not accomplish on this page. Not everyone should go around without inhibitions. Not if you get notes for everything. But: now you are definitely up to date with the Golden Record – or the Golden Record – in Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 on their way to space.

bach voyager golden record

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The Voyager Golden Record Finally Finds An Earthly Audience

Alexi Horowitz, photographed for NPR, 2 August 2022, in New York, NY. Photo by Mamadi Doumbouya for NPR.

Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi

bach voyager golden record

The Voyager Golden Record remained mostly unavailable and unheard, until a Kickstarter campaign finally brought the sounds to human ears. Ozma Records/LADdesign hide caption

The Voyager Golden Record remained mostly unavailable and unheard, until a Kickstarter campaign finally brought the sounds to human ears.

The Golden Record is basically a 90-minute interstellar mixtape — a message of goodwill from the people of Earth to any extraterrestrial passersby who might stumble upon one of the two Voyager spaceships at some point over the next couple billion years.

But since it was made 40 years ago, the sounds etched into those golden grooves have gone mostly unheard, by alien audiences or those closer to home.

"The Voyager records are the farthest flung objects that humans have ever created," says Timothy Ferris, a veteran science and music journalist and the producer of the Golden Record. "And they're likely to be the longest lasting, at least in the 20th century."

In the late 1970s, Ferris was recruited by his friend, astronomer Carl Sagan, to join a team of scientists, artists and engineers to help create two engraved golden records to accompany NASA's Voyager mission — which would eventually send a pair of human spacecraft beyond the outer rings of the solar system for the first time in history.

Carl Sagan And Ann Druyan's Ultimate Mix Tape

Carl Sagan And Ann Druyan's Ultimate Mix Tape

Ferris was tasked with the technical aspects of getting the various media onto the physical LP, and with helping to select the music. In addition to greetings in dozens of languages and messages from leading statesmen, the records also contained a sonic history of planet Earth and photographs encoded into the record's grooves. But mostly, it was music.

"We were gathering a representation of the music of the entire earth," Ferris says. "That's an incredible wealth of great stuff."

Ferris and his colleagues worked together to sift through Earth's enormous discography to decide which pieces of sound would best represent our planet. They really only had two criteria: "One was: Let's cast a wide net. Let's try to get music from all over the planet," he says. "And secondly: Let's make a good record."

That meant late nights of listening sessions while "almost physically drowning in records," Ferris says.

The final selection, which was engraved in copper and plated in gold, included opera, rock 'n' roll, blues, classical music and field recordings selected by ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax .

bach voyager golden record

When Voyager 1 and its identical sister craft Voyager 2 launched in 1977, each carried a gold record titled T he Sounds Of Earth that contained a selection of recordings of life and culture on Earth. The cover contains instructions for any extraterrestrial being wishing to play the record. NASA/Getty Images hide caption

When Voyager 1 and its identical sister craft Voyager 2 launched in 1977, each carried a gold record titled T he Sounds Of Earth that contained a selection of recordings of life and culture on Earth. The cover contains instructions for any extraterrestrial being wishing to play the record.

Ferris says that from the very start, many people on the production team expected and hoped for the record to be commercially released soon after the launch of Voyager.

"Carl Sagan tried to interest labels in releasing Voyager," Ferris says. "It never worked."

Ferris says that's likely because the music rights were owned by several different record labels who were hesitant to share the bill. So — except for a limited CD-ROM release in the early 1990s — the record went largely unheard by the wider world.

David Pescovitz, an editor at technology news website Boing Boing and a research director at the nonprofit Institute for the Future, was seven years old when the Voyager spacecraft launched.

"When you're seven years old and you hear that a group of people created a phonograph record as a message for possible extraterrestrials and launched it on a grand tour of the solar system," says Pescovitz, "it sparks the imagination."

A couple years ago, Pescovitz and his friend Tim Daly, a record store manager at Amoeba Music in San Francisco, decided to collaborate on bringing the Golden Record to an earthbound audience.

Pescovitz approached his former graduate school professor — none other than Ferris, the Golden Record's original producer — about the project, and Ferris gave his blessing, with one important caveat.

Voyagers' Records Wait for Alien Ears

Voyagers' Records Wait for Alien Ears

"You can't release a record without remastering it," says Ferris. "And you can't remaster without locating the master."

That turned out to be a taller order than expected. The original records were mastered in a CBS studio, which was later acquired by Sony — and the master tapes had descended into Sony's vaults.

Pescovitz enlisted the company's help in searching for the master tapes; in the meantime, he and Daly got to work acquiring the rights for the music and photographs that comprised the original. They also reached out to surviving musicians whose work had been featured on the record to update incomplete track information.

Finally, Pescovitz and Daly got word that one of Sony's archivists had found the master tapes.

Pescovitz remembers the moment he, Daly and Ferris traveled to Sony's Battery Studios in New York City to hear the tapes for the first time.

"They hit play, and the sounds of the Solomon Islands pan pipes and Bach and Chuck Berry and the blues washed over us," Pescovitz says. "It was a very moving and sublime experience."

Daly says that, in remastering the album, the team decided not to clean up the analog artifacts that had made their way onto the original master tapes, in order to preserve the record's authenticity down to its imperfections.

"We wanted it to be a true representation of what went up," Daly says.

Pescovitz and Daly teamed up with Lawrence Azerrad, a graphic designer who has made record packaging for the likes of Sting and Wilco , to design a luxuriant box set, complete with a coffee table book of photographs and, of course, tinted vinyl.

"I mean, if you do a golden record box set, you have to do it on gold vinyl," Daly says.

They put the project on Kickstarter and expected to sell it mostly to vinyl collectors, space nerds and audiophiles — but they underestimated the appeal.

"The internet was just on fire, talking about this thing," Daly says.

They blew past their initial funding goal in two days, eventually raising more than $1.3 million dollars, making it the most successful musical Kickstarter campaign ever. Among the initial 11,000 contributors were family members of NASA's original Voyager mission team.

An Alien View Of Earth

An Alien View Of Earth

Last week, Ferris got his box set in the mail. He says that his friend, the late Carl Sagan, would be delighted by what they made.

"I think this record exceeds Carl's — not only his expectations, but probably his highest hopes for a release of the Voyager record," Ferris says. "I'm glad these folks were finally able to make it happen."

Pescovitz says he's just glad to have returned the Golden Record to the world that created it.

At a moment of political division and media oversaturation, Pescovitz and Daly say they hope that their Golden Record can offer a chance for people to slow down for a moment; to gather around the turntable and bask in the crackly sounds of what Sagan called the "pale blue dot" that we call home.

"As much as it was a gift from humanity to the cosmos, it was really a gift to humanity as well," Pescovitz says. "It's a reminder of what we can accomplish when we're at our best."

Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale

BLOG: Music that’s Out of this World

Music that’s out of this world.

By Bruce Lamott

bach voyager golden record

The Golden Record

Imagine, if you will, a space-faring extraterrestrial rocking out to Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” or grooving to Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto. Is this science fiction or science vision? To Carl Sagan , the late Cornell professor and popularizer of intergalactic astronomy, it was worth a try. Launching what he called “a ‘bottle’ into the cosmic ‘ocean,'” it took the form of two gold-plated copper phonograph records attached to the exterior of each spacecraft–complete with stylus and playing instructions. The two disks of the Voyager Golden Record , as it is known, contained images—in analog form—of the flora and fauna of Earth, landscapes, humans in daily life, as well as audio recordings of greetings in 55 modern and ancient languages, and music selected by a committee chaired by Sagan which contained the sounds and sights of life on earth. It accompanied the first human objects to reach interstellar space, the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft launched in 1977.

The Golden Record, labeled “The Sounds of Earth,” figures prominently in The Listeners , Caroline Shaw ‘s first “oratorio” for period instruments—including audio on LP and cassette tape, the “vintage instruments” of the ’70s—soloists Avery Amereau and Dashon Burton , and the Philharmonia Chorale . Commissioned by PBO, it will have its premiere in our October set, and the producer of the record, Berkeley Professor Emeritus Timothy Ferris , will be on hand to join Caroline and me for pre-concert chat on October 17 at Herbst Theater. The composer describes the work as an oratorio because of its outer form: an extended vocal work (approximately a half-hour) with multiple movements, contrasts in performing forces, and focus on a textual theme—in this case an anthology of poetry focused on the relationship of humankind and outer space. Drawing on sources as diverse as Renaissance poet William Drummond, Walt Whitman, and Afro-Caribbean poet Yesenia Montilla, the libretto shifts midway from contemplating the universe to contemplating our place in it.

The Golden Record is pivotal to The Listeners in this change of viewpoint, but a look at its playlist also led me to contemplate our place, i.e., period instruments and historically informed performance (HIP). Setting aside for the moment the wide variety of selections, from songs of the Ituri Rainforest to Louis Armstrong playing “Melancholy Blues,” the music in our wheelhouse–European music composed before 1840–is well-represented. Other than a Queen of the Night aria from Magic Flute and the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth, Bach gets the lion’s share: Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 (Munich Bach Orchestra/Richter), the “Gavotte en Rondeau” from Partita No. 3 for solo violin (Grumiaux), and Prelude and Fugue in C Major from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II (Gould). What is not represented are any HIP performances on period instruments, other than the Renaissance “The Fairie Round” of Holborne (Munrow). Why?

Because the study of period instruments and performance practices was in its infancy. It was being nurtured in the Bay Area on the campuses of Stanford and Berkeley, and encouraged by a devoted audience of aficionados who patiently forgave the growing pains of musicians who publicly contended with unruly instruments as well as the skepticism of musical colleagues who considered them Neanderthals in an evolutionary progress of technical improvement. Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra of the West —the first period instrument orchestra in America, wouldn’t exist until 1982, five years after the Voyagers were on their way to interstellar space. Several of the artists—and conductors, for that matter– whom you have seen performing with and in our orchestra were making the audacious (and likely unprofitable) decision to exit from the conservatory-to-symphony highway to the largely uncharted byways of gut strings and baroque bows, feral baroque oboes and bassoons, one-keyed flutes, and valveless brass. The influence of HIP studies would result in quite a different sound if the Golden Record were recorded today. Forty years later, as we marvel at how far Voyager 1 and 2 have taken the music of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, let’s also remember how far we have come with it.

Experience this world premiere performance alongside Handel’s heavenly Eternal Source of Light Divine . Get tickets here. 

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How the Voyager Golden Record Was Made

By Timothy Ferris

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We inhabit a small planet orbiting a medium-sized star about two-thirds of the way out from the center of the Milky Way galaxy—around where Track 2 on an LP record might begin. In cosmic terms, we are tiny: were the galaxy the size of a typical LP, the sun and all its planets would fit inside an atom’s width. Yet there is something in us so expansive that, four decades ago, we made a time capsule full of music and photographs from Earth and flung it out into the universe. Indeed, we made two of them.

The time capsules, really a pair of phonograph records, were launched aboard the twin Voyager space probes in August and September of 1977. The craft spent thirteen years reconnoitering the sun’s outer planets, beaming back valuable data and images of incomparable beauty . In 2012, Voyager 1 became the first human-made object to leave the solar system, sailing through the doldrums where the stream of charged particles from our sun stalls against those of interstellar space. Today, the probes are so distant that their radio signals, travelling at the speed of light, take more than fifteen hours to reach Earth. They arrive with a strength of under a millionth of a billionth of a watt, so weak that the three dish antennas of the Deep Space Network’s interplanetary tracking system (in California, Spain, and Australia) had to be enlarged to stay in touch with them.

If you perched on Voyager 1 now—which would be possible, if uncomfortable; the spidery craft is about the size and mass of a subcompact car—you’d have no sense of motion. The brightest star in sight would be our sun, a glowing point of light below Orion’s foot, with Earth a dim blue dot lost in its glare. Remain patiently onboard for millions of years, and you’d notice that the positions of a few relatively nearby stars were slowly changing, but that would be about it. You’d find, in short, that you were not so much flying to the stars as swimming among them.

The Voyagers’ scientific mission will end when their plutonium-238 thermoelectric power generators fail, around the year 2030. After that, the two craft will drift endlessly among the stars of our galaxy—unless someone or something encounters them someday. With this prospect in mind, each was fitted with a copy of what has come to be called the Golden Record. Etched in copper, plated with gold, and sealed in aluminum cases, the records are expected to remain intelligible for more than a billion years, making them the longest-lasting objects ever crafted by human hands. We don’t know enough about extraterrestrial life, if it even exists, to state with any confidence whether the records will ever be found. They were a gift, proffered without hope of return.

I became friends with Carl Sagan, the astronomer who oversaw the creation of the Golden Record, in 1972. He’d sometimes stop by my place in New York, a high-ceilinged West Side apartment perched up amid Norway maples like a tree house, and we’d listen to records. Lots of great music was being released in those days, and there was something fascinating about LP technology itself. A diamond danced along the undulations of a groove, vibrating an attached crystal, which generated a flow of electricity that was amplified and sent to the speakers. At no point in this process was it possible to say with assurance just how much information the record contained or how accurately a given stereo had translated it. The open-endedness of the medium seemed akin to the process of scientific exploration: there was always more to learn.

In the winter of 1976, Carl was visiting with me and my fiancée at the time, Ann Druyan, and asked whether we’d help him create a plaque or something of the sort for Voyager. We immediately agreed. Soon, he and one of his colleagues at Cornell, Frank Drake, had decided on a record. By the time NASA approved the idea, we had less than six months to put it together, so we had to move fast. Ann began gathering material for a sonic description of Earth’s history. Linda Salzman Sagan, Carl’s wife at the time, went to work recording samples of human voices speaking in many different languages. The space artist Jon Lomberg rounded up photographs, a method having been found to encode them into the record’s grooves. I produced the record, which meant overseeing the technical side of things. We all worked on selecting the music.

I sought to recruit John Lennon, of the Beatles, for the project, but tax considerations obliged him to leave the country. Lennon did help us, though, in two ways. First, he recommended that we use his engineer, Jimmy Iovine, who brought energy and expertise to the studio. (Jimmy later became famous as a rock and hip-hop producer and record-company executive.) Second, Lennon’s trick of etching little messages into the blank spaces between the takeout grooves at the ends of his records inspired me to do the same on Voyager. I wrote a dedication: “To the makers of music—all worlds, all times.”

To our surprise, those nine words created a problem at NASA . An agency compliance officer, charged with making sure each of the probes’ sixty-five thousand parts were up to spec, reported that while everything else checked out—the records’ size, weight, composition, and magnetic properties—there was nothing in the blueprints about an inscription. The records were rejected, and NASA prepared to substitute blank discs in their place. Only after Carl appealed to the NASA administrator, arguing that the inscription would be the sole example of human handwriting aboard, did we get a waiver permitting the records to fly.

In those days, we had to obtain physical copies of every recording we hoped to listen to or include. This wasn’t such a challenge for, say, mainstream American music, but we aimed to cast a wide net, incorporating selections from places as disparate as Australia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, China, Congo, Japan, the Navajo Nation, Peru, and the Solomon Islands. Ann found an LP containing the Indian raga “Jaat Kahan Ho” in a carton under a card table in the back of an appliance store. At one point, the folklorist Alan Lomax pulled a Russian recording, said to be the sole copy of “Chakrulo” in North America, from a stack of lacquer demos and sailed it across the room to me like a Frisbee. We’d comb through all this music individually, then meet and go over our nominees in long discussions stretching into the night. It was exhausting, involving, utterly delightful work.

“Bhairavi: Jaat Kahan Ho,” by Kesarbai Kerkar

In selecting Western classical music, we sacrificed a measure of diversity to include three compositions by J. S. Bach and two by Ludwig van Beethoven. To understand why we did this, imagine that the record were being studied by extraterrestrials who lacked what we would call hearing, or whose hearing operated in a different frequency range than ours, or who hadn’t any musical tradition at all. Even they could learn from the music by applying mathematics, which really does seem to be the universal language that music is sometimes said to be. They’d look for symmetries—repetitions, inversions, mirror images, and other self-similarities—within or between compositions. We sought to facilitate the process by proffering Bach, whose works are full of symmetry, and Beethoven, who championed Bach’s music and borrowed from it.

I’m often asked whether we quarrelled over the selections. We didn’t, really; it was all quite civil. With a world full of music to choose from, there was little reason to protest if one wonderful track was replaced by another wonderful track. I recall championing Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night,” which, if memory serves, everyone liked from the outset. Ann stumped for Chuck Berry’s “ Johnny B. Goode ,” a somewhat harder sell, in that Carl, at first listening, called it “awful.” But Carl soon came around on that one, going so far as to politely remind Lomax, who derided Berry’s music as “adolescent,” that Earth is home to many adolescents. Rumors to the contrary, we did not strive to include the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun,” only to be disappointed when we couldn’t clear the rights. It’s not the Beatles’ strongest work, and the witticism of the title, if charming in the short run, seemed unlikely to remain funny for a billion years.

“Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground,” by Blind Willie Johnson

Ann’s sequence of natural sounds was organized chronologically, as an audio history of our planet, and compressed logarithmically so that the human story wouldn’t be limited to a little beep at the end. We mixed it on a thirty-two-track analog tape recorder the size of a steamer trunk, a process so involved that Jimmy jokingly accused me of being “one of those guys who has to use every piece of equipment in the studio.” With computerized boards still in the offing, the sequence’s dozens of tracks had to be mixed manually. Four of us huddled over the board like battlefield surgeons, struggling to keep our arms from getting tangled as we rode the faders by hand and got it done on the fly.

The sequence begins with an audio realization of the “music of the spheres,” in which the constantly changing orbital velocities of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and Jupiter are translated into sound, using equations derived by the astronomer Johannes Kepler in the sixteenth century. We then hear the volcanoes, earthquakes, thunderstorms, and bubbling mud of the early Earth. Wind, rain, and surf announce the advent of oceans, followed by living creatures—crickets, frogs, birds, chimpanzees, wolves—and the footsteps, heartbeats, and laughter of early humans. Sounds of fire, speech, tools, and the calls of wild dogs mark important steps in our species’ advancement, and Morse code announces the dawn of modern communications. (The message being transmitted is Ad astra per aspera , “To the stars through hard work.”) A brief sequence on modes of transportation runs from ships to jet airplanes to the launch of a Saturn V rocket. The final sounds begin with a kiss, then a mother and child, then an EEG recording of (Ann’s) brainwaves, and, finally, a pulsar—a rapidly spinning neutron star giving off radio noise—in a tip of the hat to the pulsar map etched into the records’ protective cases.

“The Sounds of Earth”

Ann had obtained beautiful recordings of whale songs, made with trailing hydrophones by the biologist Roger Payne, which didn’t fit into our rather anthropocentric sounds sequence. We also had a collection of loquacious greetings from United Nations representatives, edited down and cross-faded to make them more listenable. Rather than pass up the whales, I mixed them in with the diplomats. I’ll leave it to the extraterrestrials to decide which species they prefer.

“United Nations Greetings/Whale Songs”

Those of us who were involved in making the Golden Record assumed that it would soon be commercially released, but that didn’t happen. Carl repeatedly tried to get labels interested in the project, only to run afoul of what he termed, in a letter to me dated September 6, 1990, “internecine warfare in the record industry.” As a result, nobody heard the thing properly for nearly four decades. (Much of what was heard, on Internet snippets and in a short-lived commercial CD release made in 1992 without my participation, came from a set of analog tape dubs that I’d distributed to our team as keepsakes.) Then, in 2016, a former student of mine, David Pescovitz, and one of his colleagues, Tim Daly, approached me about putting together a reissue. They secured funding on Kickstarter , raising more than a million dollars in less than a month, and by that December we were back in the studio, ready to press play on the master tape for the first time since 1977.

Pescovitz and Daly took the trouble to contact artists who were represented on the record and send them what amounted to letters of authenticity—something we never had time to accomplish with the original project. (We disbanded soon after I delivered the metal master to Los Angeles, making ours a proud example of a federal project that evaporated once its mission was accomplished.) They also identified and corrected errors and omissions in the information that was provided to us by recordists and record companies. Track 3, for instance, which was listed by Lomax as “Senegal Percussion,” turns out instead to have been recorded in Benin and titled “Cengunmé”; and Track 24, the Navajo night chant, now carries the performers’ names. Forty years after launch, the Golden Record is finally being made available here on Earth. Were Carl alive today—he died in 1996 at the age of sixty-two—I think he’d be delighted.

This essay was adapted from the liner notes for the new edition of the Voyager Golden Record, recently released as a vinyl boxed set by Ozma Records .

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You, Too, Could Own a Copy of the Voyager Golden Record

Ozma records is producing a box set of the album sent into the cosmos to reach out to potential extraterrestrial life

Jason Daley

Correspondent

Golden Record

Record collectors shell out tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for rare discs by the Beatles or early blues artists. However, there’s one disc many collectors (and every space nerds) covets but will never get their hands on: the Golden Record. Now, a group of science enthusiasts and vinyl aficionados have teamed up to make a version of the disc available to the masses.

In 1977, 12-inch gold-plated copper discs were placed aboard the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes. The records were housed in an aluminum sleeve bearing instructions on how to play them and included a needle and a cartridge. The contents, curated by a committee headed by astronomer Carl Sagan, include 115 encoded analog images from Earth, natural sounds like birds, whales, and a baby’s cry, music by Bach, Beethoven, and Chuck Berry, greetings in 55 languages and written messages from then-President Jimmy Carter and U.N. General Secretary Kurt Waldheim.

“The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space,” Sagan noted . “But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet."

According to Megan Molteni at Wired , NASA pressed a dozen of the records, ten of which were distributed to NASA facilities. The other two are 13 billion miles from Earth on Voyager 1 and 2. Despite his requests, even Carl Sagan never received a copy. Just getting a glimpse of a Golden Record is difficult, reports Kenneth Chang for  The New York Times . A copy of the record's aluminum cover is on display at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. The record itself is can be viewed in an auditorium at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California, which is open during public lectures.

That’s why the group calling itself Ozma Records decided to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Voyager launches by reissuing the Golden Record as a box set. Last week, they listed their project on Kickstarter with a goal of raising $198,000 to produce the facsimile. The project blasted past that goal in just two days and at last count received pledges worth $658,000 from almost 5,300 backers.

The $98 reissue isn’t exactly the same as the Voyager disks. For one thing, it’s pressed from yellow vinyl, not actual copper and gold, Chang reports. It will come on 3 LPs, which are designed to be played at 33 rpm, versus the original which plays at 16.5 rpm to accommodate all the photos, messages and 90 minutes of music on a single disc. The box set will also include a hardbound book about the history and production of the record along with printed photos of the images included on the disk. An MP3 version of the audio will also be available for $15.

“When you’re seven years old, and you hear about a group of people creating messages for possible extraterrestrial intelligence,” Ozma Records' David Pescovitz, managing partner at Boing Boing and research director at Institute for the Future, tells Chang, “that sparks the imagination. The idea always stuck with me.”

In 1978, Sagan and his colleagues published Murmurs of the Earth, the story of the Golden Record’s creation, which included a track list from the record. A 1992 CD-ROM of the book was reissued including a digital re-creation of the Golden Record. But this is the first time the public has had access to the recording in the format that an alien civilization may encounter it. The production team is trying to keep the disks as close to the original as possible, and are working with science writer Timothy Ferris, who produced the original, to remaster the recordings.

“The thinking on the original was so genius that who am I to change anything about it, you know?” experienced album designer Lawrence Azerrad, who is curating the album packaging tells Molteni. “It’d be like listening to Mozart and saying, ‘Oh I think that bridge was a little fast.’ This is an awesome snapshot of who we are as the human race, and we want all of that to just sing and be as pure as possible.”

The recently acquired permissions to publish the music on the collection and expects to ship the box sets sometime during 2017, Voyager’s anniversary year.

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Jason Daley | | READ MORE

Jason Daley is a Madison, Wisconsin-based writer specializing in natural history, science, travel, and the environment. His work has appeared in Discover , Popular Science , Outside , Men’s Journal , and other magazines.

  • Voyager Golden Record
  • 1 Golden records
  • 2 Voyager craft
  • 3.1 Greetings
  • 4.1 Committee
  • 4.2 Musical artists

Golden records [ edit ]

"The Sounds of Earth" - the Voyager Golden Record

Voyager craft [ edit ]

NASA scientists attach the record to Voyager I

Contents [ edit ]

For a full list of contents, see Contents of the Voyager Golden Record

Greetings [ edit ]

  • Kurt Waldheim, Secretary-General Of The UN
  • Nick Sagan: "Hello from the children of Planet Earth"
  • Greetings In 55 Languages

Music [ edit ]

Representative audio samples

  • J.S. Bach: Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F Major, BWV 1047 - I. Allegro (1721)
  • J.S. Bach: Partita for Violin No. 3 in E major, BWV 1006 - III. "Gavotte en Rondeau" (1720)
  • W.A. Mozart: Die Zauberflöte - Aria: "Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen" (1791)
  • Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony No. 5 in c minor, op. 67 - I. Allegro con brio (1808)

Images [ edit ]

Contributors [ edit ], committee [ edit ].

Carl Sagan

Musical artists [ edit ]

Louis Armstrong

Others [ edit ]

Kurt Waldheim

  • Gallery pages about technology
  • Gallery pages about photography
  • Gallery pages about NASA
  • Gallery pages about music
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NASA’s Voyager Golden Record Gets New Vinyl Reissue

By Sam Sodomsky

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In 1977, NASA launched a vinyl record into space, containing an aural glimpse of life on Earth for any intelligent lifeforms who might receive it. The collection, which Carl Sagan helped curate, featured nature sounds, greetings in various languages, and music by Bach, Chuck Berry, and more. Since then, the LP has been widely unavailable to the public. Following a successful Kickstarter campaign , however, that’s all about to change. Light in the Attic has now announced a new box set of the Voyager Golden Record, marking the first release from Ozma Records , a new label that specializes in the “intersection of science, art, and consciousness.”

The album will be available as a set of two CDs—which is available to order now—and a 3xLP vinyl box set, which is due in February. Both editions feature remastered audio and liner notes from Timothy Ferris, who produced the original LP. Check out pictures of the collection below, and head here for more information.

Read Pitchfork’s interview with Ann Druyan, the creative director of the Golden Record project.

NASAs Voyager Golden Record Gets New Vinyl Reissue

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NASA and music: Voyager 1 and Voyager 2

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The music of NASA's Voyager Golden Records presented by Royal College of Music student Alec Coles-Aldridge.

On 25 August 2012, the Voyager 1 spacecraft entered interstellar space, the matter that exists between the star systems in a galaxy. This achievement made Voyager 1 the furthest travelling man-made object in history. Close behind is Voyager 2, the only spacecraft to have visited Uranus and Neptune.

Remarkably, travelling on each Voyager spacecraft is, amongst other material, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s (1756-1791) Queen of the Night aria from The Magic Flute and Johann Sebastian Bach’s (1685-1750) Prelude and Fugue No 1 in C major from Book Two of The Well-Tempered Clavier . These pieces of music and a selection of other compositions feature in the Voyager Golden Records – phonograph records attached to the spacecraft – whose purpose, as stated by President Jimmy Carter (b.1924), is ‘if one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message: this is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings.’     

Inevitably, any consideration of the Voyager Golden Record’s musical content will open a host of questions. Was the chosen music suitable? Why were those particular pieces selected? What impression would it make on extraterrestrial life? With regards to the only piece of keyboard music present, the choice of Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in C performed by Glenn Gould (1932-1982) is understandable.

The piece is less than five minutes thus saving precious space on the record. The piece demonstrates the piano without any additional noise from an orchestra (as a concerto would) and it demonstrates a work by a composer widely considered to be one of the greatest western composers of all time. The fact that the piece is from The Well-Tempered Clavier is significant, as the choice may have been driven by a desire to represent this monumental series of Preludes and Fugues.  

Prelude from Book 2 of The Well-Tempered Clavier performed by Glenn Gould:

Trying to conclude the exact reasoning behind their choice is difficult. However, it does lead you to a more personal question: what would I choose? My answer, Frédéric Chopin’s (1810-1849) Nocturne in B flat minor Op 9 No 1 performed by Vladimir Ashkenazy (b.1937). The opening notes fall like droplets and give way to some of the most beautiful music ever written – that’s in my humble opinion. Ashkenazy fearlessly moves between gently caressing the notes and energetically driving the music forwards.   

Nocturne in B flat minor Op 9 No 1 performed by Vladimir Ashkenazy:

However, the most interesting insight into the Golden Records is from Jason Wright, an associate professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University who wrote an article in August 2017 with the conclusion that the real audience for the records is actually Earth. In order to create the records we had to reflect and consider what we thought was a fitting representation of our species. The music scholars Stephanie Nelson and Larry Polansky captured this truth in their research report regarding the Voyager Records stating ‘by imagining another listening we reflect back upon ourselves and open ourselves to new cultures, music, understandings, other possibilities and different worlds.’

By Alec Coles-Aldridge. Alec is a student at the  Royal College of Music  studying for a Bachelor of Music Degree.

Ozma Records

VOYAGER GOLDEN RECORD

The endless legacy of Johann Sebastian Bach

As the creator of over a thousand works, the german musician still has tremendous influence today, and every easter his ‘passions’ can be heard in concerts all over the world.

Johann Sebastian Bach.

When the youngest child of the town musician Johann Ambrosius Bach and his wife Elisabetha was born in Eisenach, Germany, 339 years ago on March 21, 1685, no one could have imagined the importance that this new life would have in the history of Western music. That child, Johann Sebastian Bach, was born into a very large musical family that would inundate several generations of cultural life (Bach in German means “stream”). He would be, and still is today, the most influential composer in the long history of music from the 17th century to today. Every Easter, his Passions can be heard in concerts all over the world in a musical liturgy that goes beyond the Protestant religion in which the composition was conceived.

Today, Bach is the musician whose work remains most relevant to us, for example, in teaching this art. Johann Sebastian Bach’s own education had its light and darkness. In those years, the surname Bach in Germany was synonymous with musician. Many organists, singers, chapel masters and musical directors belonged to the Bach family. And they were all taught by fathers, cousins, brothers or uncles, which facilitated learning from an early age. Bach himself was trained by his father and older brother. The latter, however, was the one who cast certain shadows on the education of his younger brother by preventing him from accessing a precious notebook with works by other great musicians . But little Johann Sebastian sneakily copied that music at night in order to have access to the scores of the great masters of his time. For his part, Bach devoted great effort to creating works for the education of his children and students.

Bach monument in the city of Leipzig, created in 1907 by Carl Seffner (1861-1932), in the St. Thomas church.

The Well-Tempered Clavier , the French Suites , the Organ Book and Inventions are all works intended for educational purposes, primarily for his eldest son Wilhelm Friedemann, but also for the pupils he taught in Leipzig. Written in the early years of the 18th century, these books now form part of the curricula of all conservatories around the world. They help students learn the organ, harpsichord and piano, and also serve for analyzing and studying harmony, counterpoint and composition. If Suites for Solo Cello , Partitas for Solo Violin and the Sonatas for Viola da Gamba are also taken into account, Bach’s teaching spectrum widens even more. No other composer has such a strong presence in the training of our future musicians.

Waht’s more, Bach was a very prolific composer. More than a 1,000 cataloged works cover an enormous variety of genres — religious and secular cantatas, motets, masses, oratorios, passions, magnificat and chorales in vocal music. He also composed about 500 pieces for keyboard, divided evenly between the organ and the harpsichord. His instrumental and chamber music was also abundant. He wrote concertos for soloists and orchestras and purely orchestral pages. In the speculative field, he created two fundamental works, The Art of the Fugue and The Musical Offering , in which he demonstrates his enormous contemporary mastery of making contrapuntal, melodic and harmonic juggling, which has never been surpassed.

Bach knew how to combine the Italian and French styles in vogue in Europe with the Germanic tradition of Schütz, Scheidt and Buxtehude. Incidentally, he made a nearly 400-kilometer (248.5 miles) pilgrimage on foot to Lübeck to listen to the latter.

Musical architecture

All this knowledge allowed him to build his music on very solid foundations, musical architecture that confers consistency and formal balance on each and every one of his compositions, however simple or brief they may be. Bach’s work has a singular quality that has allowed his music to be approached from radically different perspectives, always successfully, from transcriptions for (sometimes picturesque) instruments, such as the accordion, the hurdy-gurdy and the pan flute, to their successful manipulation by the great masters of jazz, including John Lewis, the Modern Jazz Quartet and the Jacques Loussier Trio.

Bach’s music fills auditoriums, concert halls, churches and festivals thanks to the excellent historically rigorous interpretations that we have been able to enjoy for decades. Great musicians have become models of his music: Harnoncourt, Pinnock, Herreweghe, Gardiner and Suzuki for the most important works, and Glenn Gould, Marie-Claire Alain, Gustav Leonhardt, András Schiff and Benjamin Alard for his keyboard pieces. In addition, there’s the marvelous rediscovery of Bach’s Cello Suites by their discoverer, Pau Casals, as well as modern visions brimming with purity by Yo-Yo Ma and Jean-Guihen Queyras.

Johann Sebastian Bach with his family in 1870 in a painting by Toby Rosenthal.

Today, Bach is also very present in other arts. Choreographers such as George Balanchine, Paul Taylor and Benjamin Millepied have poured the genius of Eisenach’s most diverse creations into the art of dance.

Cinema has also made use of Bach’s music in hundreds of films. Surely Bach never could have suspected that his compositions for specific characters such as the Margrave of Brandenburg, Count Keyserlingk, or his patron, Prince Leopold of Anhald-Cöthen, would be used in an art form that he could not even imagine. To give just a few examples, Bach appears in films such as Andréi Tarkovsky’s Solaris , Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List . But perhaps the work with the greatest importance is Saraband , Ingmar Bergman’s last film and his cinematic legacy . In it, Sarabande from the Suite for Solo Cello No. 5 in C Minor BWV 1011 takes center stage to such an extent that it gives the film its title.

Bach is also commonly found on social media, websites, blogs and radio stations. For years, Radio France’s France Musique and RTVE’s Radio Clásica (Classic Radio) have maintained weekly programs dedicated to the German master’s music, such as Le Bach du dimanche and Bach Hour , which the author of this article directed until last February.

Indirectly, we are also indebted to Bach for the ability to attend public concerts. The Café Zimmermann in Leipzig — where Bach and his children and students at the Collegium Musicum offered weekly concerts — was one of the first spaces for open access to music. It was no longer only churches and palace halls where that pleasure could be enjoyed. Any artisan, merchant or law student could attend a concert and see Bach conducting one of his works.

Bach is even present on the surface of the planet Mercury. There is a perfectly circular, double-crowned impact crater that has borne the composer’s name since 1976. In addition, Bach’s music is currently traveling outside the solar system , as it is installed on the Golden Records on the Voyager spacecrafts , which contain key references of life on our planet.

Since the 17th century, scholars of nature have said that nightingales who placed their territory near a fountain or a stream sang more and better. Their life was fuller. Let us learn from these birds and live near a stream, near Bach. Our existence will be a happier one .

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The Master Recording of NASA’s Voyager Golden Record Heads to Auction

Sotheby's is offering up the original tapes of the audio included on the two interstellar probes that are the furthest man-made objects from earth..

The call of a humpback whale, a Navajo night chant and the brain waves of a woman falling in love… these are just some of the sounds recorded on NASA ’s Golden Record, the phonograph time capsule affixed to spacecraft Voyager 1 and 2. As the space-faring record continues on its now 46-year journey through the emptiness, the Golden Record’s master recording is expected to fetch $600,000 at auction later this month.

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Two audio reels stood up next to white pamphlets with audio descriptions

The copy comes from the collection of the notable couple who spearheaded the Voyager Golden Record project. Carl Sagan , the famed Cornell University astronomy professor and Cosmos host, and documentary producer and director Ann Druyan , the creative director of NASA’s Voyager Interstellar Message Project, assembled the sound essay over a six-month period in the 1970s.

“Bursting with the myriad sounds of life, Carl and I and our colleagues designed the Golden Record to be a testament to the beauty of being alive on Earth,” said Druyan in a statement, adding that the record aimed to “capture the richness and diversity of our world.” Designed to communicate the culture of Earth’s people to possible space-faring civilizations, the record could circumnavigate the Milky Way for billions of years, according to Sotheby’s, which will sell the master recording on July 27 in the first auction of objects related to NASA’s Voyager Mission.

Two men dressed in white suits and posing next to spacecraft hold golden record in their hands

Identical copies of the record were attached to NASA’s Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 when they launched in 1977 and slingshot out of the solar system in different directions. Since then, the cultural capsules have become the furthest man-made objects from Earth, and to this day, the robotic interstellar probes continue to regularly communicate with our planet.

What’s on the Voyager Golden Record?

The master recording of the Voyager Golden Record contains greetings in 59 different languages, a plethora of sounds from nature and 27 pieces of music. Scores by Bach and Beethoven were also included, as were a Peruvian wedding song, an Indian vocal raga and tracks from Chuck Berry and Louis Armstrong. The traveling records also contains 115 images picturing snapshots of human life, with photos of Olympic sprinters, a woman in a grocery store and the Golden Gate Bridge among them.

Golden-covered record attached to beige covering of spacecraft

Eight copies of the Voyager Golden Record were created, including the two currently on the spacecraft. Made of copper and plated in gold, the cover of the famous capsule contained an electroplated sample of isotope Uranium-238, which has a half-life of 4.468 billion years, to serve as a way of showing any future finders how much time passed. In addition to a hand-carved inscription reading, “To the makers of music—all words, all times,” the record was etched with scientific hieroglyphics of our star’s address, the unit of time for the speed of the record and instructions on how to play it.

“Almost half a century since their creation, these tapes, which have never been out of our possession since they were made, present a unique opportunity for a collector to obtain the only original version of the first object to cross the heliopause, that place where the solar wind gives way to the gales of interstellar cosmic rays—it may be the only thing that will live on after everything we know is gone,” said Druyan.

The Master Recording of NASA’s Voyager Golden Record Heads to Auction

  • SEE ALSO : On Arts Philanthropy: Why Everyone Wants to Be Komal Shah

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bach voyager golden record

bach voyager golden record

The Voyager’s Golden Record: Real-Life Inspiration Behind Netflix’s The Signal

I n Netflix’s “The Signal,” the Voyager spacecraft’s golden record takes center stage, offering a captivating blend of science fiction and real-world history. As protagonist Paula becomes convinced that extraterrestrial beings are attempting to communicate with Earth, the revelation that the aliens are utilizing the Voyager’s golden record adds a layer of authenticity to the narrative. Here’s a closer look at the true story behind the golden record and its significance.

The Voyager’s Golden Record: A Bridge to the Stars

In real life, the Voyager probes, launched in 1977, carry a special message intended for any intelligent life forms that may encounter them in the vast reaches of space. Affixed to each Voyager spacecraft is a golden record, curated by a committee led by renowned astronomer Dr. Carl Sagan. The purpose of the record is to introduce extraterrestrial beings to the rich tapestry of life on Earth, showcasing humanity’s achievements, cultural diversity, and artistic expressions.

What’s on the Golden Records?

Similar to its depiction in “The Signal,” the golden record contains a treasure trove of images, sounds, and greetings from Earth. These include recordings of human languages, greetings in 55 different languages, and a curated playlist of music spanning various cultures and genres. Notable selections range from classical compositions by Bach and Beethoven to traditional music from indigenous cultures around the world. Additionally, the record features a message of goodwill from the children of Earth, voiced by Nick Sagan, the son of Carl Sagan.

Real-Life Mysteries and Intrigues

While “The Signal” explores the mystery of who is saying “hello” on the golden record, real-life intrigue surrounds the whereabouts of the golden records themselves. Of the original ten copies produced, only eight are currently accounted for, with copies allegedly sent to prominent figures and institutions. However, the copies designated for the President of the United States and the Langley Research Center remain missing, sparking speculation and curiosity. This real-life mystery adds an extra layer of fascination to the enduring legacy of the Voyager’s golden record.

What inspired the concept of the Voyager’s golden record in “The Signal”?

The concept of the Voyager’s golden record in “The Signal” is inspired by the real-life golden records affixed to the Voyager spacecraft, which were designed to communicate information about Earth to potential extraterrestrial life forms.

What is included on the Voyager’s golden records in real life?

The golden records contain a diverse array of images, sounds, and greetings from Earth, including recordings of human languages, music from different cultures, and visual representations of life on Earth.

Are there any real-life mysteries associated with the Voyager’s golden records?

Yes, there are real-life mysteries surrounding the whereabouts of the golden records. While most copies are accounted for, two copies designated for prominent recipients remain missing, leading to speculation about their current location.

Who voiced the message of goodwill on the Voyager’s golden record?

The message of goodwill on the Voyager’s golden record was voiced by Nick Sagan, the son of renowned astronomer Carl Sagan, who played a prominent role in curating the contents of the golden record.

“The Signal” offers viewers a thought-provoking exploration of humanity’s quest for connection and understanding in the cosmos, drawing inspiration from the real-life story of the Voyager’s golden record. As audiences immerse themselves in the fictional narrative, they are invited to ponder the profound implications of our existence and our place in the universe, echoing the sentiments encapsulated in the golden record’s timeless message of hope and curiosity.

The Voyager's Golden Record: Real-Life Inspiration Behind Netflix's The Signal 4

IMAGES

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  2. Que contient le Golden Record de Voyager ?

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  6. Voyager Golden Record

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VIDEO

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  4. Grigory Sokolov

  5. Copy of Voyager Golden Record to go up for auction

  6. Alien civilizations

COMMENTS

  1. Voyager Golden Record

    The Voyager Golden Records are two identical phonograph records which were included aboard the two Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977. ... The musical selection is also varied, featuring works by composers such as J.S. Bach (interpreted by Glenn Gould), Mozart, Beethoven ...

  2. Voyager

    The following music was included on the Voyager record. Bach, Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F. First Movement, Munich Bach Orchestra, Karl Richter, conductor. 4:40. Java, court gamelan, "Kinds of Flowers," recorded by Robert Brown. 4:43. Zaire, Pygmy girls' initiation song, recorded by Colin Turnbull. 0:56. Australia, Aborigine songs, "Morning ...

  3. Contents of the Voyager Golden Record

    The Voyager Golden Record contains 116 images and a variety of sounds. The items for the record, which is carried on both the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft, were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University.Included are natural sounds (including some made by animals), musical selections from different cultures and eras, spoken greetings in 59 languages ...

  4. Voyager

    The Golden Record. Pioneers 10 and 11, which preceded Voyager, both carried small metal plaques identifying their time and place of origin for the benefit of any other spacefarers that might find them in the distant future. With this example before them, NASA placed a more ambitious message aboard Voyager 1 and 2, a kind of time capsule ...

  5. Voyager's Golden Record: Bach_Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F

    Music On Voyager Record Bach, Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F. First Movement, Munich Bach Orchestra, Karl Richter, conductor. 4:40

  6. Voyager Golden Record

    Voyager Golden Record. 1. Calibration circle. 2. Solar location map. 3. Mathematical definitions. 4. Physical unit definitions ... Golden Gate Bridge. 105. Train. 106. Airplane in flight. 107. Airport (Toronto) 108. Antarctic Expedition. ... BWV 1047: I. Allegro - Munich Bach Orchestra / Karl Richter (Johann Sebastian Bach) 6. Ketawang ...

  7. Voyager

    The remainder of the record is in audio, designed to be played at 16-2/3 revolutions per minute. It contains the spoken greetings, beginning with Akkadian, which was spoken in Sumer about six thousand years ago, and ending with Wu, a modern Chinese dialect.Following the section on the sounds of Earth, there is an eclectic 90-minute selection of music, including both Eastern and Western ...

  8. Bach FAQ 105

    Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, the Golden Record and an Extraordinary Success. Today the mission of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 is considered one of NASA's greatest successes because the life expectancy of both missiles has already been multiplied and they are still sending regular data from space to earth. At the same time, it is the man-made object ...

  9. The Voyager Golden Record Finally Finds An Earthly Audience

    The Voyager Golden Record Finally Finds An Earthly Audience For 40 years, ... and the sounds of the Solomon Islands pan pipes and Bach and Chuck Berry and the blues washed over us," Pescovitz says ...

  10. BLOG: Music that's Out of this World

    The two disks of the Voyager Golden Record, as it is known, contained images—in analog form—of the flora and fauna of Earth, landscapes, humans in daily life, as well as audio recordings of greetings in 55 modern and ancient languages, and music selected by a committee chaired by Sagan which contained the sounds and sights of life on earth.

  11. How the Voyager Golden Record Was Made

    How the Voyager Golden Record Was Made. Forty years ago, we sent a message to extraterrestrials—a collection of sights and sounds of life on Earth. We inhabit a small planet orbiting a medium ...

  12. Voyager Golden Record

    Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F Major, BWV 1047: I. Allego by Johann Sebastian Bach, Performed by Munich Bach Orchestra, Deutsche Grammophon Ketawang: Puspåwårnå (Kinds of Flowers), Performed by Pura Paku Alaman Palace Orchestra - Nonesuch Records ... The Voyager Golden Record will circle our Galaxy essentially forever. That means there is ...

  13. Voyager's Golden Record: Bach_ The Well Tempered Clavier

    Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2, Prelude and Fugue in C, No.1. Glenn Gould, piano. 4:48

  14. You, Too, Could Own a Copy of the Voyager Golden Record

    The other two are 13 billion miles from Earth on Voyager 1 and 2. Despite his requests, even Carl Sagan never received a copy. Just getting a glimpse of a Golden Record is difficult, reports ...

  15. Voyager Golden Record

    The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II, Prelude & Fugue No.1 in C Major, BWV 870 by Johann Sebastian Bach Lyrics. 22. Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Opus 67: I ... is the Voyager Golden Record.

  16. VOYAGER GOLDEN RECORD, Bach

    VOYAGER GOLDEN RECORDJohann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)Das wohltemperierte Klavier IIPreludium C-dur, BWV 870(Glenn Gould)

  17. The Voyager Golden Records: A Message From Humanity to the Unknown

    Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 and 2 include a set of phonographic records called "The Voyager Golden Records". Their inclusion was in the hope that. ... They feature works from Bach to Chuck Berry ...

  18. Voyager Golden Record

    For a wider selection of files connected with Voyager Golden Record, see Category:Voyager Golden Record. Voyager Golden Record two phonograph records included on both Voyager spaceprobes launched in August and September 1977 ... J.S. Bach: Partita for Violin No. 3 in E major, BWV 1006 - III. "Gavotte en Rondeau" (1720)

  19. NASA's Voyager Golden Record Gets New Vinyl Reissue

    By Sam Sodomsky. November 21, 2017. C/o Light in the Attic. In 1977, NASA launched a vinyl record into space, containing an aural glimpse of life on Earth for any intelligent lifeforms who might ...

  20. NASA and music: Voyager 1 and Voyager 2

    The music of NASA's Voyager Golden Records presented by Royal College of Music student Alec Coles-Aldridge. On 25 August 2012, the Voyager 1 spacecraft entered interstellar space, the matter that exists between the star systems in a galaxy. This achievement made Voyager 1 the furthest travelling man-made object in history.

  21. Voyager

    VOYAGER GOLDEN RECORD In 1977, NASA launched two spacecraft, Voyager 1 and 2, on a grand tour of the solar system and into the mysteries of interstellar space. ... from Bach and Beethoven to Blind Willie Johnson and Chuck Berry, Benin percussion to Solomon Island panpipes. Natural sounds—birds, a train, a baby's cry, a kiss—are collaged ...

  22. The endless legacy of Johann Sebastian Bach

    Bach is even present on the surface of the planet Mercury. There is a perfectly circular, double-crowned impact crater that has borne the composer's name since 1976. In addition, Bach's music is currently traveling outside the solar system , as it is installed on the Golden Records on the Voyager spacecrafts , which contain key references ...

  23. Voyager's Golden Record

    About Press Copyright Contact us Creators Advertise Developers Terms Privacy Policy & Safety How YouTube works Test new features NFL Sunday Ticket Press Copyright ...

  24. Master Recording of NASA's Voyager Golden Record Heads to ...

    The copy of the Voyager Golden Record will be sold at Sotheby's on July 27. Sotheby's. ... Scores by Bach and Beethoven were also included, as were a Peruvian wedding song, an Indian vocal raga ...

  25. What happened to the extra copies of the Voyager mission's golden records

    NASA launched two golden records into space on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 in 1977 as a way to teach other civilizations about life on Earth if they ever came across the probes.

  26. The Voyager's Golden Record: Real-Life Inspiration Behind ...

    In Netflix's "The Signal," the Voyager spacecraft's golden record takes center stage, offering a captivating blend of science fiction and real-world history. As protagonist Paula becomes ...