\n<\/p>\n
I<\/span>t\u2019s almost 50 years since one of the strangest records ever made was launched \u2013 not into the pop charts but into the farthest reaches of outer space. Known as the Golden Record, this 12-inch, gold-plated copper disc was an album compiled by astronomer Carl Sagan featuring everything from classical music and spoken-word greetings to the sounds of nature and a blast of Chuck Berry\u2019s Jonny B Goode. Humans could enjoy it, of course, but they weren\u2019t the target audience. Rather, a copy was placed on Voyager 1 and 2, the two space probes launched in 1977, in the hope that they would one day be discovered and listened to by an alien life form.<\/p>\n <\/span>Earth Rising: Messages from the Pale Blue Dot album cover.<\/span> Photograph: Artangel<\/p>\n The Golden Record came with various diagrammatic instructions on how to play it correctly. But as to what aliens might make of Bach\u2019s Brandenburg Concerto, the sounds of humpback whales and a greeting in the Chinese dialects Wu, we will never know. Both Voyager probes are still intact, currently hurtling through the Kuiper belt in interstellar space, but we are likely to lose contact with them in around a decade\u2019s time. This means we will miss the Golden Record\u2019s first realistic chance of being discovered \u2013 when it\u2019s expected to pass within 1.6 light years of the star Gliese 445 in 40,000 years\u2019 time.<\/p>\n And yet the record continues to inspire. It\u2019s certainly the key influence behind Earth Rising: Messages from the Pale Blue Dot, the first in a series of three audio works by arts organisation Artangel that are being released on digital platforms in the run-up to the Golden Record\u2019s 50th anniversary.<\/p>\n \u201cI visit artist studios and hear what they\u2019re grappling with,\u201d says Artangel director Mariam Zulfiqar. \u201cThey worry about what digital technology has done to human connection, this looming fear of climate, the state of geopolitics. Yet, within that fear, is also an enormous hope for what they believe humanity could be \u2013 and a desire to keep making new work that shows us a different perspective on ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>Continuing to inspire \u2026 astronomer Carl Sagan compiled the original Golden Record.<\/span> Photograph: Science History Images\/Alamy<\/p>\n Zulfiqar has been fascinated with the Golden Record ever since she was a child growing up in Pakistan. \u201cTo send this out there without knowing what would happen is quite romantic, especially in today\u2019s outcome-driven world,\u201d she says. So she came up with an idea: what if we made a modern version of the Golden Record that was less concerned with introducing ourselves to aliens and more about introducing humanity to itself? She got to work inviting artists from around the world to contribute.<\/p>\n The result is a collection of poems and experimental compositions that grapple with our present moment. Sebasti\u00e1n Riffo Valdebenito creates a track from the sounds of rock carving at the petroglyph site of Valle del Encanto in Coquimbo, Chile, while Michel Nieva contributes The Alien Mother, a short story set in a future where humanity has colonised Mars. Elsewhere, there are poems about US turmoil, ethereal songs created using just the human voice, and what is described as a \u201csonic invocation\u201d that honours the calabash, a hard-shelled type of fruit used to make instruments. It\u2019s almost as diverse and confounding as the Golden Record itself which, along with its various audio recordings, featured 115 images encoded in analogue form (a circle, a track athlete, etc) and a condensed recording of Sagan\u2019s wife\u2019s brainwaves, captured while she thought deeply about the Earth\u2019s history and various human experiences such as falling in love (I\u2019d like to see you work that one out, aliens!).<\/p>\n <\/span>A retro sci-fi feel \u2026 Max Cooper.<\/span> Photograph: Ella Mitchell<\/p>\n \u201cWhat surprised me is the connections,\u201d says Zulfiqar. \u201cThere\u2019s a beautiful line in Nigerian poet Ofem Ubi\u2019s piece Family Tree that says, \u2018In my attempts at tethering, I have loved many people, countries, ghosts.\u2019 That sense of lost love is echoed in some of the other works. Similarly, Emilia \u00c1lvarez and Max Cooper both made music using sounds from the human body.\u201d<\/p>\n The latter\u2019s track, Rhythm of Harmony (A Representation of Music), is the contribution most likely to have worked on the original LP. Inspired by some of the more withering responses to the Golden Record by philosophers of the time, who mocked the idea that other life forms would have a clue how to read the instructions, never mind appreciate, say, the traditional Aboriginal song Devil Bird, Cooper set about making a record that would have the best chance of making sense to an alien.<\/p>\n His piece is based on a series of rhythmic clicks that gradually speed up until they make the sound of a tone, at least to human ears. \u201cI\u2019ve assumed the alien that discovers this is spacefaring, so they\u2019re probably more advanced than us and their transition from individual sounds to tones maybe happens at a much higher frequency than ours,\u201d he says. \u201cSo they won\u2019t hear these nice tones like we do \u2013 what they\u2019ll hear is the relationship in terms of the rhythms of the clicks. I wanted to break music down to the simplest source of sound that an alien might be able to understand.\u201d<\/p>\n Cooper has a science background \u2013 he holds a PhD in computational biology and previously worked as a geneticist \u2013 which he puts to good use when I ask questions such as: what if aliens haven\u2019t evolved hearing in the same way we have? \u201cThere\u2019s a thing called convergent evolution,\u201d he says. \u201cOn Earth, the eye has evolved multiple times independently. It\u2019s the same with other senses like hearing. That gives us reason to believe that aliens would have similar senses. It\u2019s not watertight but you can definitely make that argument.\u201d<\/p>\n Cooper\u2019s track is embellished with huge 1980s synth chords that give it a brilliantly retro sci-fi feel, a concession to the fact that it\u2019s currently only going to be heard by humans. \u201cOriginally, the plan was for it to be made only with sounds made by the body, but the chords that came from just the body were pretty nasty,\u201d he says. \u201cI love conceptual music but I wanted to make something that was nice to listen to as well.\u201d<\/p>\n Trying to empathise with the sensory evolution of an alien race is an act of optimism that chimes with the original spirit of the Golden Record. But other contributions to Earth Rising strike a bleaker note: dehumanisation, fascism and grief are all picked over by the various artists. Porsha Olayiwola\u2019s scathing In Alignment With the Women Before Me documents the horrors that have taken place on American soil in recent years, namechecking Amber Thurman, the 28-year-old medical assistant who died of septic shock in Georgia after a medical abortion. It also references Aaron Bushnell, the 25-year-old serviceman who set himself alight outside the Israeli embassy in Washington DC.<\/p>\n <\/span>\u2018What can I do with my voice\u2019?\u2019 Porsha Olayiwola is Boston\u2019s poet laureate.<\/span> Photograph: Maddie Meyer\/Getty Images<\/p>\n \u201cI struggle with my role as a poet\/writer\/artist\/witness,\u201d says Olayiwola. \u201cPart of me always wants to do more than write \u2013 I want to organise and protest and mobilise. I ask, \u2018What can I do with my pencil? What can I do with my voice?\u2019 I thought, if anything, we must begin to speak about these things. Acknowledge and witness and document these atrocities. And perhaps we will begin to intervene.\u201d<\/p>\n I wonder if the despair of today is a little jarring considering the hope and optimism of the original project, but Zulfiqar disagrees. \u201cEven when somebody is saying something quite bleak,\u201d she says, \u201cit reflects that they believe things could be better.\u201d<\/p>\n Olayiwola agrees: \u201cWe only leave the bleakness behind if we elect to look it directly in the eye, and shape our future accordingly. My poem serves as a reflection of the abyss. May it be as dark as the night sky in which we may see a glimmer of a star.\u201d<\/p>\n Earth Rising: Messages from the Pale Blue Dot is out now<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s almost 50 years since one of the strangest records ever made was launched \u2013 not into the pop charts but into the farthest reaches of outer space. Known as the Golden Record, this 12-inch, gold-plated copper disc was an album compiled by astronomer Carl Sagan featuring everything from classical music and spoken-word greetings to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9165,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[1098,299,1096,1097,613,1095,1100,686,1099,1101],"class_list":{"0":"post-9164","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-50yearold","9":"tag-album","10":"tag-aliens","11":"tag-follow","12":"tag-heres","13":"tag-hey","14":"tag-hurtling","15":"tag-music","16":"tag-record","17":"tag-space"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9164"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9164\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}