An examination of NASA's Golden Record that offers new perspectives
and theories on how music can be analyzed, listened to, and thought
about--by aliens and humans alike.
In 1977 NASA shot a mixtape into outer space. The Golden Record aboard
the Voyager spacecrafts contained world music and sounds of Earth to
represent humanity to any extraterrestrial civilizations. To date, the
Golden Record is the only human-made object to have left the solar
system. Alien Listening asks the big questions that the Golden Record
raises: Can music live up to its reputation as the universal language in
communications with the unknown? How do we fit all of human culture into
a time capsule that will barrel through space for tens of thousands of
years? And last but not least: Do aliens have ears?
The stakes could hardly be greater. Around the extreme scenario of the
Golden Record, Chua and Rehding develop a thought-provoking,
philosophically heterodox, and often humorous Intergalactic Music Theory
of Everything, a string theory of communication, an object-oriented
ontology of sound, and a Penelopean model woven together from strands of
music and media theory. The significance of this exomusicology, like
that of the Golden Record, ultimately takes us back to Earth and its
denizens. By confronting the vast temporal and spatial distances the
Golden Record traverses, the authors take listeners out of their comfort
zone and offer new perspectives in which music can be analyzed, listened
to, and thought about--by aliens and humans alike.
