The music of the voyager interstellar record

Abstract

An experiment in applied communication at the margins, approximately 90 minutes of music was selected from cultures around the world by Carl Sagan and his associates and placed aboard the two Voyager spacecraft in 1977. Both spacecraft have now reached the outer edges of our solar system and are heading toward deep space. This gift of music and other information about us has only the slimmest chance of ever being retrieved by extraterrestrialsy—the closest encounter with a star system that could contain life will occur 40,000 years from now. The gesture is principally examined in this paper for what it says about us as homo musicus, beings who sing as well as speak. The Voyager music selection team believed that the inclusion of musical sound texts could capture something quintessential about human selfhood that could not be communicated by other means. Several questions are raised and the Voyager Record critiqued from the issues they present: How does one portray the diversity of human music‐making? What is music, and can it adequately be represented as a sound text? How is musical perception tied to the human body and human cognitive processes, and are these factors likely to be prohibitive of non‐human musical apprehension? What role does music play as a signifier of human selves and cultures? As an applied communication project, the Voyager Record is also measured against some recent prescriptives by communication scholars for an applied communication research agenda.