In 1977, NASA launched the Voyager 1 & 2 spacecraft, fastening to each a phonograph album containing sounds and music of Earth. If the best calculations are to be believed, one of these records was intercepted and remixed sometime in 2000 by extraterrestrial intelligences on the edge of our solar system. The original two-hour record, compiled by a team headed by astronomer Carl Sagan, was meant to represent to aliens the variety of Earth’s musical and sonic offerings. But the consideration the consortium gave to choosing compositions and performances from around the planet appears to have been completely misinterpreted — if not deliberately misconstrued or even mocked — by these otherworldly DJs. In the segments of the remix that audio researchers have reconstructed from transmissions received in 2007 at the radio telescope of Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and from the screensavers of people participating in the SETI@home project, it would seem that the extraterrestrials have made a hash of Sagan and company’s anthropological and technological project.
Published documentation of the Voyager album’s contents attribute most of the disc’s non-Western music to anonymous ethnics — with credit and copyright often given to those European and American ethnomusicologists who recorded such phantom figures as “Pygmy girls” and “Navajo Indians” — while the names of Bach, Mozart, and Stravinsky sit engraved as signatures of European genius. Signaling an attitude Sagan clearly would have commended, the aliens have disregarded the differences the details of these attributions might suggest (though the resulting, largely implicit, cosmic critique of the record’s Eurocentrism comes off as unintentional and confused, even if the remixes do call into question some of the dearest assumptions of Western music theorists [1]). More, it is obvious that the aliens take as only the merest suggestion the 16 2/3 RPM at which the record is designed to play (explained by this icon, on the back of the Voyager record,
which designates along its circumference in binary arithmetic “the correct time of one rotation of the record, 3.6 seconds, expressed in time units of 0.70 billionths of a second, the time period associated with a fundamental transition of the hydrogen atom” [2].). The photographs the record contains, encoded in the audio spectrum, have also apparently been treated as fodder for an undiscerning — or perhaps contrarian — alien auditory imagination. What is more remarkable on the alien remixes, however, is a creeping sense that the agents behind them don’t always seem to be able to tell the difference between organized sounds produced by humans and damage to the record resulting from interstellar dust. Indeed, in many cases the aliens have decrypted the disc’s information according to radically different conceptions of how matter is organized; the stylus provided with the record has been used in odd ways and sometimes disregarded entirely. None of this may be a surprise. After all, as Dr. Richard Doyle of Penn State explains, “the very essence of the alien presence … [is] its characteristic ability to proliferate and mutate, disturbing the various taxonomical categories that we bring to bear on ‘them’” [3].
It could also be that the aliens were unmoved by Voyager’s musical program and sought in their version to reprimand Earthlings with an obnoxious response to what Sagan and others primly termed, in the title of their explanatory coffee-table book, Murmurs of Earth. A 1987 review of the original record by an earthling concerned about alien ears and other sensory organs lends support to this hypothesis:
Ten year ago, America perjaculate Voyager satellite out of planethood. Voyager had Golden Record holding gobs of Gaia tunage to interest/tice/press aliens. Aliens want state-of-art mega-hip scene. But music on Voyager record is hundreds of years old! No synthesizer, no drum machine, no dance remix! No wondering that, in ten year, not a one alien has called! Aliens hear old tunage, puke out all kidneys from ear-pain. Say: “Gaia beings are coma-toast lamo Gilligans.” (www.brunching.com/flashvoyager.html)
The listener will note that the decoded material on the tracks presented here includes pieces that sound suspiciously like dance remixes made with looping software. Such moments may, however, constitute artifacts of earthly deconvolution technologies.
Even through the translatory mediation of our all-too-human audio algorithms, however, it is apparent that the aliens are playing fast and loose with complex intercultural questions and flirting with copyright violation on an interstellar scale. In their remixes, they take unprecedented liberties with the sounds of Earth, bounding beyond even the most elementary of legal restrictions — enumerated in such cautions as the following, which appeared on a 1992 commercially available CD-ROM of the Voyager Interstellar Record:
WARNING: Unless you have the express written permission of Warner New Media, it is a violation of United States copyright law to use this product in any manner other than as an integrated presentation, to copy, photograph, transcribe, sample, print out or otherwise record in any manner the product or any portion (no matter how small) of the product, including the pictures, other graphic images, text or music contained in the product, or to synchronize or otherwise combine this product or any portion (no matter how small) of this product with any other material of any kind.
In view of this warning, listeners might reason that any Earthly decryption of the alien remix should only be listened to in outer space, where the rearrangement was originally created (and where, paradoxically — as the inscription on the Voyager record, “To the makers of music, all worlds, all times,” implies — all remixes might be considered at once completely outside the law and perfectly legal [4]) [5]. Terrestrial auditors might also keep in mind, however, that claims of copyright violation in Warner’s statement rest on the assumption that the pirate aliens consistently used the same device to read as Earthlings did to write; since this is not always true, it is unclear whether any violation of copyright obtains here at all [6].
These transcriptions are incomplete. Listeners might keep an ear out for the arrival of new remixes from the stars and consider posting these to the appropriate interstellar websites. The extraterrestrials are still transmitting, perhaps even seeking to locate original performers, technicians, record executives, lawyers, drum sets, and dust particles, calling those agents within hailing frequencies to continue to transmute their alien transformations.
Notes
1. See, e.g., P. Whincop. “The Scope of Transformational Voice Leading between Two Sets.” Doctoral Dissertation, Harvard University, Department of Music, 2008.
2. C. Sagan, F.D. Drake, A. Druyan, T. Ferris, J. Lomberg, L.S. Sagan. Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record. Random House, 1978, p. 37.
3. R. Doyle. Wetwares: Experiments in Postvital Living. University of Minnesota Press, 2003, 197.
4. Compare S. Helmreich. Xerophonics: Copying Machine Music. Seeland Records, 2003 for adjacently extralegal issues in sampling.
5. This argument leaves aside the question of whether the presence of information in this decryption of a decryption may a priori violate key laws of physics. See
M. Lachmann, M.E.J. Newman, and C. Moore, “The Physical Limits of Communication, or why any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from noise.” American Journal of Physics 72 (2004): 1290–1293.
6. C. Kelty, impersonal communication, 10 April 2005
