A Bottle in a Cosmic Ocean: Listen to the Music of The Golden Record by Lauren Weiss, CommunicationsAugust 31, 2016

The Golden Record

On September 5, 1977, a tiny planet called Earth launched the Voyager 1 into the cosmos. It has now traveled further into space than any other man-made object in history. On-board this spacecraft was “a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings”: the Golden Record. Created by a team led by Carl Sagan, this record was meant to provide a visual and aural representation of life on Earth for whoever might be out there. Carl Sagan said of the project, "The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced space-faring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this 'bottle' into the cosmic 'ocean' says something very hopeful about life on this planet." There is certainly something hopeful about sending a bit of humanity forever soaring into the cosmos, just in case the almost-impossible happens and it reaches another civilization.

To celebrate the anniversary of this hopeful project, here’s a guide to all of the music included on The Golden Record. Musical selections span cultures and continents, providing a beautiful slice of humanity’s creativity.
 

Music on the Golden Record

Unfortunately, these recordings don’t exist in our collections, but they can be found on YouTube:
Georgian S.S.R., chorus, "Tchakrulo," collected by Radio Moscow. 2:18
Azerbaijan S.S.R., bagpipes, recorded by Radio Moscow. 2:30
Peru, panpipes and drum, collected by Casa de la Cultura, Lima. 0:52
Solomon Islands, panpipes, collected by the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Service. 1:12
Peru, wedding song, recorded by John Cohen. 0:38
China, ch'in, "Flowing Streams," performed by Kuan P'ing-hu. 7:37
Bulgaria, "Izlel je Delyo Hagdutin," sung by Valya Balkanska. 4:59

Fun fact: the Golden Record also provided one of nerd-doms greatest love stories: Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan fell in love while they were working together on the project, and the record of her brainwaves as she describes falling in love with Sagan is included on the record. Swoon times a million:

"My feelings as a 27 year old woman, madly fallen in love, they're on that record,” says Druyan. "It's forever. It'll be true 100 million years from now. For me Voyager is a kind of joy so powerful, it robs you of your fear of death."

You can go on NASA’s website to see the images on the record and hear the “Sounds of Earth” that were included, as well as hear the greetings in 55 languages (including whale). Though the book detailing the contents of The Golden Record (entitled Murmurs of Earth) is out of print, the Library has one research copy and one e-book available for browsing.

Affixing the Golden Record to the side of the Voyager - two separate Voyager crafts were sent out in 1977, heading for different regions of space, each with a Golden Record on-board.
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It's all Greek to me (or is it?)

Submitted by Demetrios Velis... (not verified) on August 20, 2018 - 4:59am

As a native speaker of Modern Greek and as a speaker of Dutch, French, and German in addition to English, I was unpleasently surprised to hear the recorded fragment in Greek on the webpage "A Bottle in a Cosmic Ocean: Listen to the Music of The Golden Record" (URL: https://www.nypl.org/blog/2016/08/31/listen-music-golden-record .) Whereas those of speakers in the other above-mentioned languages I know and probably in all the other ones as well save Greek were standard and pronounced by native speakers as in the late 1970's the one in Greek was pronounced in an awful Erasmian prounounciation of an agrammatically formulated text in Ancient(!) Greek by obviously no classics scholar let alone a native speaker of Modern Greek. The team at Cornell could have easily found a professor or even an (under)graduate student from Greece at that university to record that text in Modern Greek at the time (let alone reach out to anyone of the thousands of Greek-born residents of New York City,) Why they have not done so mystifies me. I regret this as much as the fact that a text in Swahili has been omitted from the recording of the 55 languages.