Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched in 1977 on a mission to explore the outer planets and their moons. The twin spacecraft are on escape trajectories that are taking them out of the Solar System and into interstellar space. Attached to each Voyager is a gold-coated record as a message to possible extraterrestrials that might encounter the spacecraft in the distant future.

Each record contains 118 photographs (including an image of the old Terminal One at what was then called Toronto International Airport), greetings in 55 human languages (and one whale language), an audio essay called “The Sounds of Earth”, statements from the President of the United States and the Secretary General of the United Nations, and almost 90 minutes of music from around the world. The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a small team led by Carl Sagan. As a non-core objective of the Voyager mission, the record project operated on a shoestring with few resources and limited time (only a few months). Many team members contributed their efforts on a voluntary basis.

For the musical selections, Sagan’s team worked with several experts including the ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax who was the founder of the Association for Cultural Equity (ACE) and had been an advocate since the 1940s of what we would today call multiculturalism. According to Sagan, the team “wished to avoid a Western European musical ghetto” and took great care to be inclusive with respect to geographical and cultural diversity. Of the 27 musical selections on the record, 14 are from non-Western cultures and include Andean panpipes, Azerbaijani mugham, polyphonic vocal music from Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), Indonesian gamelan, Senegalese percussion, and a Peruvian wedding song. Only four pieces of American music are on the Voyager record: a Navajo night chant and three works by Black artists (“Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry, “Melancholy Blues” by Louis Armstrong, and “Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground” by Willie Johnson).

Update: My friend Ian Stones tells me the recording of Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier was performed by Canadian pianist Glenn Gould.

“Billions of years from now our Sun, then a distended red giant star, will have reduced Earth to a charred cinder. But the Voyager record will still be largely intact, in some other remote region of the Milky Way galaxy, preserving the murmur of an ancient civilization that once flourished – perhaps before moving on to greater deeds and other worlds – on the distant planet Earth.”

Source: Murmurs of Earth by Carl Sagan, Frank Drake, Ann Druyan, Timothy Ferris, Jon Lomberg, and Linda Salzman (Ballantine, 1978), which was dedicated “To the makers of music – all worlds, all times.”