
Music from Earth - superglu
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/music.html
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glaberficken
Would love to see the following experiment:

1) Take a bunch of people from different backgrounds, ages, etc

2) Test if they know about the golden records

3) Take the ones who don't and close them in an office/workshop with access to
pen/paper/computers/tools but no internet

4) Task them with decoding the record and report what they find in it

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kirykl
using younger subjects might be ideal also, they could be unfamiliar with how
records work

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andyjohnson0
Related: A group on Kickstarter are producing a reproduction of the Voyager
record [1]. It closed a few days ago.

[1] [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ozmarecords/voyager-
gol...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ozmarecords/voyager-golden-
record-40th-anniversary-edition/)

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mangamadaiyan
Here are the pieces themselves:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bhuq9rNO_FQ&list=PLA5Z0m2JKy...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bhuq9rNO_FQ&list=PLA5Z0m2JKyVJUgkMG08WP8KsAvLrjfkjP)

~~~
tga
> Unfortunately, this video is not available in your country because it could
> contain music from UMG, for which we could not agree on conditions of use
> with GEMA.

(on Bach_Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F,
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olLi5RtE_6M&list=PLA5Z0m2JKy...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olLi5RtE_6M&list=PLA5Z0m2JKyVJUgkMG08WP8KsAvLrjfkjP&index=5))

I find it telling and sad that the same music that we're sending aliens
presumably to represent the human race cannot be freely accessed here on Earth
for bullshit business/legal reasons.

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hizanberg
I'm more annoyed Extra Terrestrials get to listen to our music for free
without any geographical restrictions! hardly seems fair.

~~~
dasboth
"I'm sorry, the content you requested is not available in your solar system
due to intergalactic copyright laws".

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divanvisagie
This is Earth Radio, and now here's... Human Music

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bgnm2000
Show me what you got.

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dmichulke
The queen of the night aria will probably destroy all the alien glassware.

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DeveloperPanda
So happy to find out my mother tongue was one of the 55 languages included in
the Greetings from Earth :)

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RichardCA
More or less accurate:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bhuq9rNO_FQ&index=1&list=PLA...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bhuq9rNO_FQ&index=1&list=PLA5Z0m2JKyVJUgkMG08WP8KsAvLrjfkjP)

~~~
caine123
ghgg

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tgb
I love the project as a whole, but why send music? Even terrestrial non-human
animals have basically no interest in our music, why would extraterrestrials?

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pierrec
You could say the exact same thing, replacing "music" with "written language",
or essentially _anything_ you could put on the probe. The point is, we have
zero reference allowing us to imagine the mind of a being capable of catching
and analyzing the probe. Not even ourselves, we're too stupid.

Let's make the improbable assumption that someone will receive it, otherwise
the exercise is futile. They probably won't be highly interested in our
"advanced" knowledge of mathematics and physics, so let's only inscribe
minimal required information to roughly convey our level of advancement, since
our radiation-resistant media has limited storage.

So what's the most interesting data left? All I see is descriptive information
about life on earth, and insights into the functioning of the human mind. This
is where art comes in. That leaves us weighing the potential alien interest in
different forms of art, and music turns out to be an art form that requires
relatively little cultural context in order to be appreciated, while still
having surprising depth and being an outstanding representation of our mind's
uniqueness.

~~~
tgb
If we received a record from extraterrestrials, what would most like to see on
it? Music would be awesome, of course, but chances are they don't have music,
maybe they have something else but it would be meaningless to us, like an ant
sending artistic pheromones, except far more bizarre since they'd share _no_
common environment or past. Not meaningless to us would be details about their
atmosphere, their society (if that were easily communicable), their technology
(even if less advanced than ours), and - by far the biggest - their biology
and that of their planet. There's some of that on the record, but it's clear
to me that including more than, say, one song, is a service to the humans
launching it, not the hypothetical receivers. Then again, in all likelihood,
humans are the only pieces of intelligent life to every go near the Voyagers,
so perhaps it's them who should be appeased.

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staticelf
I wonder how the list would look like if voyager would be sent today?

Would we for example send Justin Bieber, Rick Ross or artists like Deadmous5?

~~~
pavel_lishin
Most of that music wasn't contemporary.

Rite of Spring, El Cascabel, Johnny B. Goode, Melancholy Blues, and Dark Was
The Night date from the same century; I can't figure out if the Japanese piece
does or not.

Everything else seems to be much older.

I was going to say that we'd be more likely to send something more provably
enduring from living artists, and I was about to name Prince and Bowie, but,
alas.

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piokuc
No Motörhead?..

