When Voyager 1 and its identical sister craft Voyager 2 launched in 1977, each carried a gold record titled T he Sounds Of Earth that contained a selection of recordings of life and culture on Earth. The final selection, which was engraved in copper and plated in gold, included opera, rock 'n' roll, blues, classical music and field recordings selected by ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax. That meant late nights of listening sessions while "almost physically drowning in records," Ferris says. "And secondly: Let's make a good record." Let's try to get music from all over the planet," he says. They really only had two criteria: "One was: Let's cast a wide net. "That's an incredible wealth of great stuff."įerris and his colleagues worked together to sift through Earth's enormous discography to decide which pieces of sound would best represent our planet. "We were gathering a representation of the music of the entire earth," Ferris says. In addition to greetings in dozens of languages and messages from leading statesmen, the records also contained a sonic history of planet Earth and photographs encoded into the record's grooves. Radiolab Carl Sagan And Ann Druyan's Ultimate Mix Tapeįerris was tasked with the technical aspects of getting the various media onto the physical LP, and with helping to select the music. In the late 1970s, Ferris was recruited by his friend, astronomer Carl Sagan, to join a team of scientists, artists and engineers to help create two engraved golden records to accompany NASA's Voyager mission - which would eventually send a pair of human spacecraft beyond the outer rings of the solar system for the first time in history. "And they're likely to be the longest lasting, at least in the 20th century."
"The Voyager records are the farthest flung objects that humans have ever created," says Timothy Ferris, a veteran science and music journalist and the producer of the Golden Record.
The Golden Record is basically a 90-minute interstellar mixtape - a message of goodwill from the people of Earth to any extraterrestrial passersby who might stumble upon one of the two Voyager spaceships at some point over the next couple billion years.īut since it was made 40 years ago, the sounds etched into those golden grooves have gone mostly unheard, by alien audiences or those closer to home. The Voyager Golden Record remained mostly unavailable and unheard, until a Kickstarter campaign finally brought the sounds to human ears.
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