Golden Record

  1. Ugam - Azerbaijan bagpipes (Wind)

  2. Bach - Gavotte en Rondo - A Grumiaux (Violin)

  3. Mozart - Queen of the night- Eda Moser (Orchestra + Opera)

  4. Tchakrulo - Choir - Georgia (Vocal)

  5. Navajo Night Chant - America (Percussion + Vocals)

  6. Panpipes and drum song - Peru (Percussion + Pipes)

  7. Melancholy Blues-L Armstrong&HisHotSeven (Trumpet + Guitar)

  8. Jaat Kahan Ho - India - Surshri (Strings + Vocals)

  9. Beethoven 5th, part 1, Otto Klemperer (Orchestra)

  10. Greetings from Earth (Vocals; various greetings across multiple languages)


This assignment was surprisingly quite difficult; I can only imagine how monumental the task of assembling an auditory record of all human activity must have seemed! I chose my list on the basis of its cultural variety; similar to Smith, 1999, I considered any track I selected as having deep cultural significance for the people of Earth, and furthermore, it had to present a unique sound or sound combination that might help an alien intelligence appreciate what human life on earth would have been like (and how varied our cultures are, musically, as a roughly equivalent metric for sociological diversity as well). I was initially somewhat disappointed that there was no auditory recording of any other species (whale songs, bird mating calls, etc.) or even of a forest ecosystem, as this implied willful ignorance an important part of our history and a respect for the biodiversity of our planet, however, I was pleasantly surprised during episode #65 of the Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast to hear that whalesong, among other naturalist recordings, had been included. Indeed, I too found myself struggling to suppress my bias in over-representing Western cultures in my song choices, as I felt that each choice ought to represent more than my subjective preferences as a listener, and though it may be impossible, I wanted to strive to choose those pieces which could be thought of not only as culturally relevant to a broad swath of humanity but approaching objectively beauty as well. In spite of the folly of such idealism, I nevertheless feel that this list of 10 songs represents a sufficient range of musical instruments, vocals and language for any listener to glean meaningful information about its makers, and hopefully, they can appreciate the beauty we sought to bring into our world as well.


References


Smith, A. (1999). Why digitize? Retrieved June 15, 2019, from Council on Library and Information Resources website: https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub80-smith/pub80-2/