How NASA Tried to Represent Humankind on Voyager's Golden Record and What That Tells You About Our Eurocentric Perception of Music History

Lukas Kamenski

In 1977 the two scientific NASA spacecrafts Voyager I and II were successfully launched into space and they are, to this date, the farthest man-made objects from Earth. A few years before take-off, the American astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan was asked by NASA to chair a committee of experts to represent planet Earth and its inhabitants by creating a record made of gold-plated copper, sent onboard the Voyager space probes hopefully to be discovered by extraterrestrials.

Carl Sagan himself noted about Voyager's Golden Record that "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".

Sagan's committee chose various natural sounds and recordings of human speech to be engraved on the plate's surface. Most importantly to us musicians, however, was that the committee also included 27 musical pieces. Of these, nine belonged to the Western classical tradition (3x Bach, 2x Beethoven, 1x Stravinsky, Mozart, Holborne and Barcelata), three were popular or jazz recordings (Chuck Berry, Louis Armstrong and Blind Willie Johnson) and 15 belonged to what Western musicologists would broadly call world or ethnic music (4x Asia, 2x Africa, 3x Americas, 3x Australia and Oceania and 3x Europe). Here's a playlist of all 27 pieces, have a listen:

Looked at as a whole, Golden Record comprises a total of 12 tracks from Europe and 7 from the Americas, with only 8 tracks left for all the other continents (while representing 85% of the world’s population). So why is there this vast overrepresentation of music that stems from the European tradition? And can Voyager's Golden Record, despite this fact, still be called a representation of humankind?

From a 1970ies-US-American point of view, I think there might be several justifications for this strong focus on Western music by Carl Sagan and his committee of various experts. First, no other musical tradition had such well-documented history as the European music: They could quite accurately describe the developments that took place in European music in the last 1000 years and therefore could conclude which pieces might be of special significance to anyone unfamiliar with terrestrial music. Second, no other musical tradition had such a solid and well-publicized theoretical foundation that showed the potential aliens that we do not only perform music but also think about it and actively contribute to further develop it. Third, and I think this an especially important reason, even in non-Western countries most people listened and still listen to music that is at least partly influenced by the European classical tradition (especially in the realm of harmony and musical form) while the reverse was not necessarily highly prevalent and inclusion of world music in pop records was just in the beginnings (think of the Bealtes and Ravi Shankar of the late 60ies). Last but not least, these Western musical pieces represented the same culture that invented and built the Voyager spaceship, so it probably seemed somewhat legitimate to give them a special place. The simple fact that most of the committee was socialized in a European musical background might also have played a role that is not to be underestimated

From today's point of view, however, I think it would be not very thoughtful to send such a Euro-heavy musical playlist to extraterrestrials. From my point of view, the playlist today would have to include a more diverse representation of human music, including women composers and much more music from countries with cultures of non-European descent. After all, wouldn't we like to show our (hopefully friendly) interstellar neighbours that music is there to be made for everyone?

References:

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/