Music from Earth | Hacker News Reader

Music from Earth

voyager.jpl.nasa.gov

47 pointssuperglu25 comments

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

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

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...

Here are the pieces themselves:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bhuq9rNO_FQ&list=PLA5Z0m2JKy...

> 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...)

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.

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

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

Especially for music that's in the public domain.

Sad indeed :/

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

Show me what you got.

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

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

More or less accurate:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bhuq9rNO_FQ&index=1&list=PLA...

ghgg

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?

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.

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.

It's not about them, it's about us - music is important to us, so we sent it.

target is intelligent extra-terestrials, not necessarily space cows

Music is patterns that intelligent beings could identify, even if they couldn't appreciate the aesthetics

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?

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.

Shhh... we don't want to provoke them...

Skrillex

No Motörhead?..

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