A music writer revisits NASA’s disco-era message to aliens

Jonathan Scott likes weird records with distinct formats: playable postage stamps and golden disks billions of miles from Earth carrying disco-era messages for extraterrestrials, to name a couple. The Vinyl Frontier is his breezy take on the creation of the latter.

The story of the phonograph records strapped to the two Voyager spacecraft currently hurtling into interstellar space—on which Carl Sagan and friends packed pictures, sounds, and music from Earth—has been told several times before, including by the people behind the project (1). And it’s a great story.

The cast of characters alone is tremendous, featuring Sagan, the artist Linda Salzman Sagan, the novelist Ann Druyan, the science writer Tim Ferris, cosmic communicator Frank Drake, and a supporting chorus of ethnomusicologists, artists, and science fiction writers. Their adventures choosing pictures to represent our species, tracking down native Nguni speakers, and riffling through dusty forgotten boxes in Manhattan are still inspiring and engaging. The Vinyl Frontier tells the tale well, doing a particularly good job of giving a feel for the people involved and the day-to-day aspects of the project, although it does not break any dramatically new ground.

One of this book’s strong points is its emphasis on the fact that the Voyager record was very much a product of its age and of the country in which it was made. The pictures inscribed on the record were largely drawn from mass-market educational and coffee table–style books found all over middle America in the late 1970s, whereas NASA’s censoring of nude figures and sex organs is a reminder of the country’s puritanical character (a point that the author returns to perhaps slightly too often). And although the record team’s attempts to be inclusive regarding culture and gender were remarkable for the era, many of their choices would read as colonialist or patronizing today.

Unfortunately, the cringeworthy elements on the record are unchangeable. As Scott puts it, they are like a tattoo: What seemed cool at 18 might be embarrassing now.

The book is written in a lively, often jocular tone. This is sometimes distracting, such as when Tim Ferris is described as being “cool as f*@k,” but it serves to keep the narrative moving at a brisk pace. Scott also has a tendency to imagine conversations and events for which the documentary record is spotty, which can make it hard to tell which portions of the text are well supported by historical evidence and which are not.

Early in the book, Scott invokes the metaphor of the Voyager record as the ultimate mixtape—creating a link between his professional expertise as a music writer and the subject at hand—although he doesn’t go very far with this. Other music metaphors tend to be strained. The challenge of naming a spacecraft mission, for example, is explained through the metaphor of negotiations with the bassist of a heavy metal band.

Sometimes the musical links are helpful, though, such as when we learn about Sagan’s interest in the similarities between mathematics and music as forms of universal communication. These connections also help the reader understand the larger decisions that had to be made during the project. Should the music on the record be chosen to represent as much of the world as possible, or should it be chosen for structure (most likely to be appreciated by aliens)?

There are other moments when Scott’s expertise would have contributed an interesting perspective to the narrative: He sagely wonders, at one point, whether the Sagan team’s Murmurs of Earth was a science book or an art book, for example. Scott seems perfectly situated to answer this interesting question, but he leaves the reader dangling.

The Vinyl Frontier’s major contribution to the Voyager story is showing how many different narratives surround it. Why weren’t the Beatles included? The standard story is that the copyright holder for “Here Comes the Sun” asked for the astronomical sum of $50,000, far beyond the project’s budget. Frank Drake says the Beatles themselves said no. Tim Ferris remembers that he dropped it from the record because he didn’t think it was a very good song.

Scott ends the book by inviting everyone to try the Voyager project for themselves: Take 6 weeks (with no internet!) to gather 90 minutes of music, 12 minutes of sound, and 120 images to represent humanity “on a good day.” The results of that invitation, drawn from around today’s globalized world, would make for a fascinating sequel.

References

1. 1. C. Sagan, Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record (Random House, 1978)

About the author

The reviewer is at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University, New York, NY 10003, USA.