Music Book Review: The Vinyl Frontier: The Story of the Voyager Golden Record by Jonathan Scott

The Vinyl Frontier: The Story of the Voyager Golden Record
by Jonathan Scott (Music 780.266 Sco)

 

Remember making mix tapes? Maybe you made mix CDs or playlists, depending on your age. Whatever the medium, I’m sure you can remember how painstaking this process can be, picking just the right songs for that right person or occasion. You could spend days getting a tape just right!

 

Now imagine having to come up with the ultimate mix tape, one that can introduce the inhabitants of Planet Earth to anyone else who might be our neighbors in the universe. This was essentially the task given to Carl Sagan and his committee in the creation of the Voyager Golden Record, created to send along with the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft, in hopes that some future civilization might stumble upon these vessels on their journey into deep space. The project of creating these records was originally documented in the 1978 book Murmurs of Earth, which has long been out of print, but a new book tells the story in even more detail.

 

Jonathan Scott’s The Vinyl Frontier: The Story of the Voyager Golden Record combines biographical information on Carl Sagan, historical information on the Voyager missions, and a lot of philosophical pondering regarding how anyone can decide how to represent an entire civilization’s character and history on a single side of a slow-playing record. Noted ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax was involved with the committee, as was Robert E. Brown of the Centre for World Music and conductor Murray Sidlin. Languages and images from Earth were also represented on the Golden Record, creating more painstaking decisions, and Scott recounts these choices as well, even describing how images were converted to be represented in sound waves. Many ordinary citizens were brought to Cornell to record greetings in a wide variety of world languages, and as you’ll find out in the book, the diversity of languages they were able to represent on the record far exceeded their initial goals.

 

This is a great book for thinking about music and culture on a cosmically significant level, but you’ll also find much to love here if you’re interested in the golden age of space exploration. Voyager 1 and 2 have made it to interstellar space now, and no matter how our civilization evolves or devolves from here, we have forever launched a snapshot of the way we were in 1977 into the cosmos.

[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music by Maria Eriksson.]

[ publisher’s official The Vinyl Frontier web site ] | [ official Jonathan Scott web site ]

 

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library

 

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