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A look at 31 recordings on the cosmic playlist that is the Voyager Golden Record

By Geoffrey Thatcher

There are records that are iconic and those that can be described as "out of this world" — the Voyager Golden Record is both.

It has been 40 years since the records left the Earth on a journey to the outer planets and then into the unknown.

In 1977, Voyager I and Voyager II launched from Kennedy Space Center on a mission to the solar system’s outer planets and beyond. The nature of the spacecraft heading out into space is what inspired scientists to include the golden records on the side of the each Voyager craft, in the case it was ever found by extraterrestrial life, according to the book "Murmurs of Earth" by Carl Sagan.

The songs included span a variety of genres, from Eastern to classical to jazz and everywhere in between.

According to Sagan, the Beatles song "Here Comes the Sun" was also considered. The band liked the idea, but record company opposed the move.

The record contains not only music, but also includes greetings in 55 languages, sounds of nature and pictures of the world.

"The sound essay was conceived for two audiences: the human and extraterrestrial," wrote Sagan. "In the former we hoped to evoke smile of recognition, and in the latter a sense of the variety of the auditory experiences that are part of life on Earth."

"This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours," said then President Jimmy Carter on the recording.

Then United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim also recorded a message on the records.

As the name suggests the Voyager Golden Record is different from other records, in part, due to its construction. According to NASA’s website , the records are made with gold-plated copper and the case was made of aluminum with "an ultra-pure sample of the isotope uranium-238" applied to the exterior.

Previous satellites, the Pioneer 10 and 11 missions, were the first to be sent on a journey out of the solar system. At the time the satellites were equipped with a simple plate that showed the earth’s celestial coordinates and an anatomical representation of two people, a man and a woman.

On September 12, 2013, the Voyager 1 spacecraft was the "first human-made object to venture into interstellar space," according to a NASA press release . The craft transmits data back over a billion miles away from Earth by communicating with with a series of satellite dishes spread around the world, which are called the Deep Space Network .

Since the Voyager missions launched in the 70s, there has only been one mission sent on a trajectory out of the solar system — the New Horizons mission. Unlike the missions before it the New Horizons spacecraft did not carry a plaque or golden record. Since its launch, a project called the "One Earth Message" has been collecting signatures to petition NASA into uploading user submitted content onto the craft's computers. According to the project's website , "NASA is currently reviewing the project with great interest. NASA has said that it is pleased to participate in the effort and the New Horizons mission has agreed to upload it."

The legacy of the Voyager Golden record continues on Earth as well. In 2016, California based Ozma Records launched a Kickstarter to produce the records listeners on Earth. The company plans to produce vinyls as well as CDs for Voyager enthusiasts to commemorate 40 years since the Voyager Missions.

Learn more about the golden records and the missions on NASA's website.

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golden record

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The Golden Record

Pioneers 10 and 11, which preceded Voyager, both carried small metal plaques identifying their time and place of origin for the benefit of any other spacefarers that might find them in the distant future. With this example before them, NASA placed a more ambitious message aboard Voyager 1 and 2, a kind of time capsule, intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record, a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth.

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What Is on Voyager’s Golden Record?

From a whale song to a kiss, the time capsule sent into space in 1977 had some interesting contents

Megan Gambino

Senior Editor

“I thought it was a brilliant idea from the beginning,” says Timothy Ferris. Produce a phonograph record containing the sounds and images of humankind and fling it out into the solar system.

By the 1970s, astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake already had some experience with sending messages out into space. They had created two gold-anodized aluminum plaques that were affixed to the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft. Linda Salzman Sagan, an artist and Carl’s wife, etched an illustration onto them of a nude man and woman with an indication of the time and location of our civilization.

The “Golden Record” would be an upgrade to Pioneer’s plaques. Mounted on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, twin probes launched in 1977, the two copies of the record would serve as time capsules and transmit much more information about life on Earth should extraterrestrials find it.

NASA approved the idea. So then it became a question of what should be on the record. What are humanity’s greatest hits? Curating the record’s contents was a gargantuan task, and one that fell to a team including the Sagans, Drake, author Ann Druyan, artist Jon Lomberg and Ferris, an esteemed science writer who was a friend of Sagan’s and a contributing editor to Rolling Stone .

The exercise, says Ferris, involved a considerable number of presuppositions about what aliens want to know about us and how they might interpret our selections. “I found myself increasingly playing the role of extraterrestrial,” recounts Lomberg in Murmurs of Earth , a 1978 book on the making of the record. When considering photographs to include, the panel was careful to try to eliminate those that could be misconstrued. Though war is a reality of human existence, images of it might send an aggressive message when the record was intended as a friendly gesture. The team veered from politics and religion in its efforts to be as inclusive as possible given a limited amount of space.

Over the course of ten months, a solid outline emerged. The Golden Record consists of 115 analog-encoded photographs, greetings in 55 languages, a 12-minute montage of sounds on Earth and 90 minutes of music. As producer of the record, Ferris was involved in each of its sections in some way. But his largest role was in selecting the musical tracks. “There are a thousand worthy pieces of music in the world for every one that is on the record,” says Ferris. I imagine the same could be said for the photographs and snippets of sounds.

The following is a selection of items on the record:

Silhouette of a Male and a Pregnant Female

The team felt it was important to convey information about human anatomy and culled diagrams from the 1978 edition of The World Book Encyclopedia. To explain reproduction, NASA approved a drawing of the human sex organs and images chronicling conception to birth. Photographer Wayne F. Miller’s famous photograph of his son’s birth, featured in Edward Steichen’s 1955 “Family of Man” exhibition, was used to depict childbirth. But as Lomberg notes in Murmurs of Earth , NASA vetoed a nude photograph of “a man and a pregnant woman quite unerotically holding hands.” The Golden Record experts and NASA struck a compromise that was less compromising— silhouettes of the two figures and the fetus positioned within the woman’s womb.

DNA Structure

At the risk of providing extraterrestrials, whose genetic material might well also be stored in DNA, with information they already knew, the experts mapped out DNA’s complex structure in a series of illustrations.

Demonstration of Eating, Licking and Drinking

When producers had trouble locating a specific image in picture libraries maintained by the National Geographic Society, the United Nations, NASA and Sports Illustrated , they composed their own. To show a mouth’s functions, for instance, they staged an odd but informative photograph of a woman licking an ice-cream cone, a man taking a bite out of a sandwich and a man drinking water cascading from a jug.

Olympic Sprinters

Images were selected for the record based not on aesthetics but on the amount of information they conveyed and the clarity with which they did so. It might seem strange, given the constraints on space, that a photograph of Olympic sprinters racing on a track made the cut. But the photograph shows various races of humans, the musculature of the human leg and a form of both competition and entertainment.

Photographs of huts, houses and cityscapes give an overview of the types of buildings seen on Earth. The Taj Mahal was chosen as an example of the more impressive architecture. The majestic mausoleum prevailed over cathedrals, Mayan pyramids and other structures in part because Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan built it in honor of his late wife, Mumtaz Mahal, and not a god.

Golden Gate Bridge

Three-quarters of the record was devoted to music, so visual art was less of a priority. A couple of photographs by the legendary landscape photographer Ansel Adams were selected, however, for the details captured within their frames. One, of the Golden Gate Bridge from nearby Baker Beach, was thought to clearly show how a suspension bridge connected two pieces of land separated by water. The hum of an automobile was included in the record’s sound montage, but the producers were not able to overlay the sounds and images.

A Page from a Book

An excerpt from a book would give extraterrestrials a glimpse of our written language, but deciding on a book and then a single page within that book was a massive task. For inspiration, Lomberg perused rare books, including a first-folio Shakespeare, an elaborate edition of Chaucer from the Renaissance and a centuries-old copy of Euclid’s  Elements  (on geometry), at the Cornell University Library. Ultimately, he took MIT astrophysicist Philip Morrison’s suggestion: a  page  from Sir Isaac Newton’s  System of the World , where the means of launching an object into orbit is described for the very first time.

Greeting from Nick Sagan

To keep with the spirit of the project, says Ferris, the wordings of the 55 greetings were left up to the speakers of the languages. In  Burmese , the message was a simple, “Are you well?” In  Indonesian , it was, “Good night ladies and gentlemen. Goodbye and see you next time.” A woman speaking the Chinese dialect of  Amoy  uttered a welcoming, “Friends of space, how are you all? Have you eaten yet? Come visit us if you have time.” It is interesting to note that the final greeting, in  English , came from then-6-year-old Nick Sagan, son of Carl and Linda Salzman Sagan. He said, “Hello from the children of planet Earth.”

Whale Greeting

Biologist Roger Payne provided a whale song (“the most beautiful whale greeting,” he said, and “the one that should last forever”) captured with hydrophones off the coast of Bermuda in 1970. Thinking that perhaps the whale song might make more sense to aliens than to humans, Ferris wanted to include more than a slice and so mixed some of the song behind the greetings in different languages. “That strikes some people as hilarious, but from a bandwidth standpoint, it worked quite well,” says Ferris. “It doesn’t interfere with the greetings, and if you are interested in the whale song, you can extract it.”

Reportedly, the trickiest sound to record was a  kiss . Some were too quiet, others too loud, and at least one was too disingenuous for the team’s liking. Music producer Jimmy Iovine kissed his arm. In the end, the kiss that landed on the record was actually one that Ferris planted on Ann Druyan’s cheek.

Druyan had the idea to record a person’s brain waves, so that should extraterrestrials millions of years into the future have the technology, they could decode the individual’s thoughts. She was the guinea pig. In an hour-long session hooked to an EEG at New York University Medical Center, Druyan meditated on a series of prepared thoughts. In  Murmurs of Earth , she admits that “a couple of irrepressible facts of my own life” slipped in. She and Carl Sagan had gotten engaged just days before, so a love story may very well be documented in her neurological signs. Compressed into a minute-long segment, the  brain waves  sound, writes Druyan, like a “string of exploding firecrackers.”

Georgian Chorus—“Tchakrulo”

The team discovered a beautiful recording of “Tchakrulo” by Radio Moscow and wanted to include it, particularly since Georgians are often credited with introducing polyphony, or music with two or more independent melodies, to the Western world. But before the team members signed off on the tune, they had the lyrics translated. “It was an old song, and for all we knew could have celebrated bear-baiting,” wrote Ferris in  Murmurs of Earth . Sandro Baratheli, a Georgian speaker from Queens, came to the rescue. The word “tchakrulo” can mean either “bound up” or “hard” and “tough,” and the song’s narrative is about a peasant protest against a landowner.

Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode”

According to Ferris, Carl Sagan had to warm up to the idea of including Chuck Berry’s 1958 hit “Johnny B. Goode” on the record, but once he did, he defended it against others’ objections. Folklorist Alan Lomax was against it, arguing that rock music was adolescent. “And Carl’s brilliant response was, ‘There are a lot of adolescents on the planet,’” recalls Ferris.

On April 22, 1978,  Saturday Night Live  spoofed the Golden Record in a  skit  called “Next Week in Review.” Host Steve Martin played a psychic named Cocuwa, who predicted that  Time  magazine would reveal, on the following week’s cover, a four-word message from aliens. He held up a mock cover, which read, “Send More Chuck Berry.”

More than four decades later, Ferris has no regrets about what the team did or did not include on the record. “It means a lot to have had your hand in something that is going to last a billion years,” he says. “I recommend it to everybody. It is a healthy way of looking at the world.”

According to the writer, NASA approached him about producing another record but he declined. “I think we did a good job once, and it is better to let someone else take a shot,” he says.

So, what would you put on a record if one were being sent into space today?

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Megan Gambino | | READ MORE

Megan Gambino is a senior web editor for Smithsonian magazine.

You Can Now Listen to the Voyager Golden Record Online

The sounds of Earth, launched into space in the 1970s, now available on Soundcloud.

Voyagers 1 and 2 both carry a Golden Record, intended to play the sounds of our planet for any advanced extraterrestrials who might one day find a lonely spacecraft and wonder what the people who built it were like. The sound files—which include animals, vehicles, music, and more—were already available individually on the NASA Voyager website . Now that they're on Soundcloud, though, you can enjoy them as the full playlist they were intended to be:

Source: Popular Science

Andrew's from Nebraska. His work has also appeared in Discover, The Awl, Scientific American, Mental Floss, Playboy, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn with two cats and a snake.

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• Music On the Voyager Golden Record

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NASA and music: Voyager 1 and Voyager 2

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The music of NASA's Voyager Golden Records presented by Royal College of Music student Alec Coles-Aldridge.

On 25 August 2012, the Voyager 1 spacecraft entered interstellar space, the matter that exists between the star systems in a galaxy. This achievement made Voyager 1 the furthest travelling man-made object in history. Close behind is Voyager 2, the only spacecraft to have visited Uranus and Neptune.

Remarkably, travelling on each Voyager spacecraft is, amongst other material, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s (1756-1791) Queen of the Night aria from The Magic Flute and Johann Sebastian Bach’s (1685-1750) Prelude and Fugue No 1 in C major from Book Two of The Well-Tempered Clavier . These pieces of music and a selection of other compositions feature in the Voyager Golden Records – phonograph records attached to the spacecraft – whose purpose, as stated by President Jimmy Carter (b.1924), is ‘if one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message: this is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings.’     

Inevitably, any consideration of the Voyager Golden Record’s musical content will open a host of questions. Was the chosen music suitable? Why were those particular pieces selected? What impression would it make on extraterrestrial life? With regards to the only piece of keyboard music present, the choice of Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in C performed by Glenn Gould (1932-1982) is understandable.

The piece is less than five minutes thus saving precious space on the record. The piece demonstrates the piano without any additional noise from an orchestra (as a concerto would) and it demonstrates a work by a composer widely considered to be one of the greatest western composers of all time. The fact that the piece is from The Well-Tempered Clavier is significant, as the choice may have been driven by a desire to represent this monumental series of Preludes and Fugues.  

Prelude from Book 2 of The Well-Tempered Clavier performed by Glenn Gould:

Trying to conclude the exact reasoning behind their choice is difficult. However, it does lead you to a more personal question: what would I choose? My answer, Frédéric Chopin’s (1810-1849) Nocturne in B flat minor Op 9 No 1 performed by Vladimir Ashkenazy (b.1937). The opening notes fall like droplets and give way to some of the most beautiful music ever written – that’s in my humble opinion. Ashkenazy fearlessly moves between gently caressing the notes and energetically driving the music forwards.   

Nocturne in B flat minor Op 9 No 1 performed by Vladimir Ashkenazy:

However, the most interesting insight into the Golden Records is from Jason Wright, an associate professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University who wrote an article in August 2017 with the conclusion that the real audience for the records is actually Earth. In order to create the records we had to reflect and consider what we thought was a fitting representation of our species. The music scholars Stephanie Nelson and Larry Polansky captured this truth in their research report regarding the Voyager Records stating ‘by imagining another listening we reflect back upon ourselves and open ourselves to new cultures, music, understandings, other possibilities and different worlds.’

By Alec Coles-Aldridge. Alec is a student at the  Royal College of Music  studying for a Bachelor of Music Degree.

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The songs sent into space on the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft.

Selected by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan , these songs were etched into a 12-inch, gold-plated copper record that was placed aboard the two spaceships in 1977.

• Johann Sebastian Bach : Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F, first movement (4:40)
• Java: court gamelan, “Kind of Flowers” (4:43)
• Senegal: percussion (2:08)
• Zaire: Pygmy girls’ initiation song (0:56)
• Australia: Aboriginal songs “Morning Star” and “Devil Bird” (0:56)
• Mexico: “El Cascabel” (0:56)
• Chuck Berry: “Johnny B. Goode” (2:38)
• New Guinea: men’s house song (2:38)
• Japan: flute, “Crane’s Nest” (2:38)
• Johann Sebastian Bach: Partita No. 3 in E major for violin, Gavotte en rondeau (2:38)
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart : The Magic Flute , “Queen of the Night” aria (2:55)
• Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic: chorus, “Tchakrulo” (2:18)
• Peru: panpipes and drums (0:52)
• Louis Armstrong and His Hot Seven: “Melancholy Blues” (3:05)
• Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic: bagpipes (2:30)
• Igor Stravinsky: Rites of Spring , sacrificial dance (4:35)
• Johann Sebastian Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier , Book 2, Prelude and Fugue in C, No. 1 (4:48)
• Ludwig van Beethoven: Fifth Symphony, first movement (7:20)
• Bulgaria: “Izlel je Delyo Hagdutin” (4:59)
• Navajo Indians: night chant (0:57)
• Anthony Holborne: “The Fairie Round” (1:17)
• Solomon Islands: panpipes (1:12)
• Peru: wedding song (0:38)
• China: “Flowing Streams” (7:37)
• India: raga, “Jaat Kahan Ho” (3:30)
• Blind Willie Johnson: “Dark Was the Night” (3:15)
• Ludwig van Beethoven: String Quartet No. 13 in B flat, Op. 130, Cavatina (6:37)
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