Task 8 – Golden Record Curation

This task is very interesting to me. As I was going through this list, I tried to put myself in the place of an astronaut going into space, imagining myself in a confined space and thinking about what I wanted the extraterrestrial beings to know about planet Earth. My idea is to include sounds from nature and, of course, products of humans. And my criteria is to pick the ones I think are special and a good collection to represent Earth and human cultures. 

Like what has been mentioned in the podcast by Timothy, it is hard to make a selection to represent Earth and human society. However, I do make my choices based on my understanding of what might make more sense and encourage them to explore more about us. And hopefully the device we sent with the record with still work for them to actually crack out ‘digital codes’. 

I was looking for a variety of different sounds, styles and tempos as I think I prefer the music to be noticeable rather than just sounds that even I feel difficult to make sense of (yeah, very personal). 

As I listened through the sounds, the one thing that consistently stood out to me was that any of the music with repetitive chanting ended up not making my list, as I could see myself not enjoying that if I was listening to it over and over again. I had the idea of picking out half of my list of natural sounds and half of them from human-made sounds. However, I couldn’t do that, because most of them are just human-created sounds, whether from a man-made machine or man-made music instrument or just human vocal sounds. If I were to make the decisions on the soundtrack, I would include more sounds of nature.

As Dr. Smith (1999) has been telling us: the process of digitize knowledge or products, we are limiting what we are allowing people to know. I guess that’s what make this assignment so challenging. There won’t be a perfect Voyager Golden Record just like there won’t be a perfect representation of all human cultures.