The Vinyl Frontier

by Jonathan Scott

  David Pescovitz – who co-produced the Ozma Records project with San Francisco record-store manager Tim Daly and music-packaging designer Lawrence Azerrad – explained that in some cases Alan had provided the Voyager team with unreleased recordings on tape reels that just simply didn’t carry any information. He found this out when viewing scans of the original reels and tape boxes from Lomax’s collection that are now stored in the US Library of Congress. In the case of the Solomon Islands track, this had been known simply as ‘Solomon Islands Panpipes’. David called the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation (SIBC), the local radio station that had made the original recording, to see what he could find out. The librarian knew about the record, sure, but didn’t know who the performers were. David’s next step was to seek the help of anthropologists and musicologists in the region, including Martin Hadlow, a communications professor at the University of Queensland who had done extensive research at the SIBC. None of the leads paid off until months later when Hadlow happened to attend a meeting at the SIBC and mentioned the Voyager record. A young woman working there overheard and revealed that she was related to the original musicians. Several weeks later, Pescovitz received a recounting of the song’s recording as told by Isaac Smith Houmaawa’i, leader of the group. So a song, formerly known simply as Solomon Islands Panpipes, was now correctly labelled ‘Naranaratana Kookokoo’ (‘The Cry of the Megapode Bird’) as performed by Maniasinimae and Taumaetarau Chieftain Tribe of Oloha and Palasu’u Village Community in Small Malaita.

  Another piece that came straight from Alan Lomax was ‘Senegalese Percussion’, an atonal piece that’s all about rhythm – the instruments are drums, bells and flutes, but even the flute-like instruments really serve as another drum. If you go online to read some official NASA history of the Voyager record, it will usually still identify one of the tracks as ‘Senegalese Percussion’, or sometimes by the name ‘Tchenhoukoumen’. Both are wrong. It’s actually from Benin and called ‘Cengunmé’. The errors this time were revealed to David and his team by Charles Duvelle,12 the musicologist who had collected the recording in the field. The title of the song was incorrectly listed on the jacket of the LP that Lomax loaned to Tim Ferris – from which they sourced the song. David said: ‘I know which LP that was because I have a receipt that Lomax made Tim sign when he loaned him the records.’

  ‘Cengunmé’ was performed by Mahi musicians and recorded by Duvelle in January 1963 in Savalou, Benin, West Africa – about 1,000 miles from Senegal.

  Tim told me: ‘I read somewhere that Alan had contributed three-quarters of the record or something, and that’s nonsense. But he did contribute a lot. He was a unique individual … He was not the best person in the world at working with others. He had some frustrations in life, he was broke all the time. And we tried to help him out a bit, but he always wanted a bigger role and more recognition.’

  As we explore more of the songs in the running for Voyager 1 and 2, it’s worth introducing Folkways Records. To give you a flavour of the incredibly varied back catalogue at Folkways, here are a handful of titles picked at random: Sweet Thunder: Black Poetry by Nancy Dupree (FW09787, 1977); Electronic Music by the University of Toronto Electronic Music Studio (FW33436, 1967); Koto: Music of the One-string Ichigenkin by Isshi Yamada (FW08746, 1967); and Jewish Folk Songs by Ruth Rubin (FW08740, 1959). The label was founded by Polish-American recording engineer Moses Asch in 1948, with the aim of documenting the entire world of sound. The 2,168 titles Asch released on Folkways13 included traditional and contemporary music, spoken word in many languages, and documentary recordings of individuals, communities and events.

  One Folkways track that was in the process of graduating from the Voyager team’s longlist to the shortlist was Native American ‘Navajo Night Chant’. ‘Night Chant, Yeibichai Dance’, to give it its full title, was originally issued in 1951 on the Ethnic Folkways Library record Music of the American Indians of the Southwest (FW04420), with original liner notes by Willard Rhodes, the then-associate professor of music at Columbia University. The track was recorded by Rhodes in Pine Springs, Arizona, in the summer of 1942. The night chant was one of 35 major Navajo ceremonies, part of a rite-of-passage ceremony initiating boys and girls into the tribe’s ceremonies, accompanied by gourd rattles. At the time that the Voyager record left Earth, it was widely known that the chant was recorded by Willard Rhodes. Now, thanks to the researchers at Ozma Records, the tracklist can include the names of the performers: Ambrose Roan Horse, Chester Roan and Tom Roan.

  The Voyager records would also have two pieces representing parts of the former Soviet Union, both from the Caucasus. There was a Georgian chorus championed by Lomax, and a piece often labelled ‘Azerbaijan Bagpipes’ or ‘Ugam’. It is actually called ‘Muğam’ and it doesn’t have any bagpipes. It was performed by folk musician Kamil Jalilov, playing the recorder-like balaban, a cylindrical-bore double-reed wind instrument, and was recorded by Radio Moscow circa 1950. The errors came from the original liner notes of Folkways record Folk Music of the U.S.S.R. 14 (FW04535) in 1960.

  ***

  After their week in Washington DC, Ann and Tim had returned to New York with around 50 sounds to play with. These weren’t going to be plopped together any old how; they would need to be crafted, edited and mixed to create a coherent sound essay further down the track. And in the strict narrative sense of this story, the actual mixing wouldn’t begin for a while yet. But to explore the sound essay further, I’m going to take you through its early movements.

  The sound essay goes by the name of the ‘Sounds of Earth’. Press play on Voyager’s ‘Sounds of Earth’ and it lurches into the ‘pre-life’ phase. A series of rumblings – volcanoes, earthquakes and thunder – are followed by gurgling mud pots, then sounds of wind, rain and surf. Next comes life, with crickets and frogs, the majority of sounds taken from the CBS library.15 The essay moves up the food chain – from insects to birds, to hyenas, elephants, chimpanzees and dogs – before, still only a few minutes in, we hear our first human sounds: footsteps, mixed with a heartbeat.

  Then the first human steps up to the interstellar mic. And what does he do? He laughs. That’s right, the first sound generated by human vocal chords16 within the Voyager record sound essay is not speech, not a shout nor a murmur, but laughter. This all seems pleasingly appropriate, what with laughter being more or less unique to us humans. Yes, experiments have shown that if you tickle baby rats you can hear what could be described as a kind of ultrasonic laughter. But still, if we were in a classroom with every other species on Earth, each showing off some unique attribute during an eternal show-and-tell, we might well choose laughter to show the class, or possibly opposable thumbs.

  The laugh in question is rather odd. It’s a short, high-pitched staccato sound of someone obviously having hysterics, followed by one of those post-mirth recovery ‘wahoos’. It isn’t a perfect, archetypal laugh. It’s quite a strange, atypical laugh. There’s nothing wrong with it, you understand, it’s just not that representative. It’s a laugh, no doubt about it. It sounds free, easy and genuine, but you wouldn’t necessarily pick it out of a laugh line-up. And it’s quite easy to miss in some of the lower-quality online versions of the record. You can tell it’s a man doing the laughing, and that’s about it.

  In Murmurs they don’t mention where the laugh came from. It’s simply grouped together in the soundscape playlist as ‘Footsteps, Heartbeats and Laughter’. Then in 2017, during the build-up to Voyager’s 40th-birthday shenanigans, Adrienne LaFrance wrote a piece about the laugh for the Atlantic. She wanted to know whose it was, and why it seemed to be missing from NASA’s official Soundcloud version of the record. Turns out it wasn’t missing at all – it was just very hard to hear because of the quality of that particular source. Nevertheless, Adrienne still wanted to know who was doing the laughing and, despite lots of digging, couldn’t find anybody who could answer that question. NASA didn’t know, the Library of Congress couldn’t help, the Carl Sagan Institute
at Cornell was nonplussed, and Jet Propulsion Laboratory-Caltech had no knowledge.

  Then JPL’s Senior Storyteller, science writer Elizabeth Landau, got back in touch to say she’d met with Ann Druyan earlier that day who told her the laugh belonged to Carl Sagan. Ah, good. That all seems to fit. But no, wait. Tim Ferris was also contacted about it. He had no memory of it being Carl, felt that it didn’t sound like Carl, and that it was too good a fit for the story to be true. Oh Lord.

  I can’t say with any certainty whether it is Carl or not. I’ve listened to it a lot. I’ve listened to it over and over, then compared it with Carl laughing on YouTube clips and the like. I think it could be him, but it could easily not be him too. The team did do some of the sound recordings themselves – on the fly and in the field during those hectic weeks of May 1977 – so it’s perfectly plausible that it is Carl doing the laughing. Plus, if it is Carl, that would explain why this slightly odd, atypical laugh made the final mix,17 rather than a better example from a sound library’s vaults. And certainly, in a blog post dating from 2007, long before Adrienne’s piece, Ann writes about it being Carl’s laugh. We can also look to the original reel-to-reel tapes that survive within Sony’s archive for further evidence. These come from towards the end of the record’s mixing and mastering process. One of the tape boxes is scrawled with numbered tracks, in various different hands. The first half of the list comprises sound effects provided by a sound library. The second half is all sounds that we know were created by the team – and sandwiched within this list is the word ‘laughter’. Still, whoever it is, don’t you think it’s rather splendid that in this ultra-serious, rather worthy endeavour to transmit humanity’s soul to the cosmos, we start off with a guffaw?

  We’d met insects, said hello to birds and listened to some chimps making a hullabaloo. Next comes the desolate howl of a wild dog, heard against a bleak rasping wind, all sounding very Hammer horror, before giving way to humans (by now about six minutes in) whose aforementioned hysterical laughter lightens the mood. Just after the laughter, with the heartbeat playing behind in the mix, comes ‘Fire and Speech’. We hear the crackling of flames, and then the first talking. Specifically this is the distinctive click language of the !Kung Kalahari bushmen, although the words are not spoken by the hunter-gatherers themselves but by noted anthropologist and Toronto professor Richard Lee, who studied the !Kung for many years and authored the influential work Man the Hunter.18

  Next the team wanted to illustrate that key stopping-point on human evolution – the use of stone tools. They wanted the sound of tools being fashioned, but nothing was coming up in the sound-library vaults. Carl went wandering the streets of Midtown New York to find suitable rocks to bang together. I don’t know if you’ve ever hunted for flint tools, but the streets of New York is not where I would start. He couldn’t find anything suitable, so Carl consulted the Rolodex again and called Alexander Marshack (from the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard) to get the low-down on how tools were made. Linda got hold of some flint samples from Ralph Solecki19 at Columbia University – indeed, Ralph went further, also providing gloves and goggles20 – and they set to work, recording the sound of stones hitting stones.

  Part 12 of the sound essay is known as ‘Tame Dog’. Unlike the wild dog from a few minutes before, this dog sounds like an ordinary domesticated animal and was deliberately placed in the chronology after the first sounds of human activity in order to send this message to ET: one wild dog, plus humans with tools, equals one tame dog.21

  ‘Tame Dog’ is followed by more agricultural sounds: herding sheep, a working blacksmith’s, sawing and a tractor. Ann writes in Murmurs how they had toyed with sounds of roosters and cows too, but these were abandoned as sounding too stagey. With the human audience in mind, that was probably a smart decision. There might have been barely stifled guffaws had they gone full ‘Old Macdonald’.

  After the sounds of agriculture and first machinery, come the first sounds of long-distance communication. The team had already decided they wanted to include Morse, but what message? Carl immediately suggested ‘Ad astra per aspera’ (to the stars through difficulties), and the message was tapped out by Robert R. Schoppe, a radio operator at CBS.

  Next comes the ‘Transportation Sequence’, where we hear ships, horses and carts, trains, trucks, tractors, buses, cars, an F-111 fly-by and the sound of a Saturn V rocket launching Apollo 17 in December 1972.

  ***

  Alongside the music team, the picture team and the sound-essay sub-team, sat the language or greetings sub-team. The brief for this group was to record an array of greetings in as many human languages as possible. This was to be a literal ‘Hello, universe’. In some ways this is the most outward-facing aspect of the record, in other ways the most pointless. It would also cause a hell of a lot of trouble.

  The idea to include any greetings was open to question in the first place. Everyone knew that even the most gifted alien linguist would be unable to decipher the sounds – there were never any plans to send any kind of audio Rosetta Stone. Nevertheless, it seemed a perfectly pleasant idea to have at least some form of spoken ‘hello’ on the record, and the moment that decision was made, it seemed too open to criticism merely to say ‘hello’ in the predominant Western language of American English. So they decided to say ‘hello’ in multiple languages, and soon the ambition was to cram on as many languages as they could. This was to be a global ‘yo’. And the moment that idea was on the table, it wasn’t much of a stretch to argue that a smattering of some non-human language should be included too.

  Ann recalls: ‘When [Carl] was talking about the greetings and language, he was saying we want to include all these greetings in many different languages … And I looked at him and said: “Only human languages?” And he gave me this look which was one of such affirmation – that I was the right woman for the job.’

  So around the same time Ann was trawling sound libraries for hyenas, she called Dr Roger Payne at Rockefeller University. Roger and his wife Katie were among the first people to study the communications of humpback whales, with the hope of interpreting them. Ann explained all about their interstellar global yo, and their wish to include whale greetings alongside the human ones. Roger said: ‘Where have you been all my life?’ He could barely contain his enthusiasm, promising to bring everything he had, all the recordings he had made during years of study in the field. Indeed, he had a favourite one already in mind, a recording made off the coast of Bermuda in 1970.

  The greetings/languages team started out with pretty lofty ambitions. But in the end, with time running out, the majority were compiled in a relatively last-minute scramble by Cornell staffers and PR bods. The languages of Earth, humanity’s great global greeting to the cosmos, were brought together in the main by dipping into the cultures represented in Cornell’s student and faculty body that summer. Why? Because politicians don’t know when to shut up.

  If you look at an online Golden Record playlist right now, the majority of spoken-word greetings are divided into two chapters. The first in the production timeline is known as ‘UN Greetings’, and was Sagan’s bright idea. He was in New York. Naturally enough, he thought to himself: ‘Where can we quickly find lots of people who speak different languages in New York? Why the United Nations, of course!’ Sagan pictured a kind of open-mic operation, where delegates could be invited to simply say ‘hello’ in their own language. Excellent plan. What could possibly go wrong?

  In Murmurs, Sagan writes about how he first asked the US delegation for help. It sounded simple enough, but the magnitude of this one-time-only chance to greet the cosmos was too great for them. They didn’t have the right to take that responsibility. A global greeting to be preserved forever? This was too far above and beyond their pay grade. Plus, it was weird. So Carl want to the UN’s Outer Space Committee, as he knew some of them personally. Their feeling was: ‘Yes we can do this! … But we can’t initiate it. We need to be acting on orders from above.’ So Carl
went back to the US delegation again. They made it clear: ‘We’ll do it, sure, but we need to be told to do it by the State Department.’

  Already pulling his hair out at this chicken-and-egg conundrum, Carl was then told off. He should not have gone to the Outer Space Committee directly. He had said too much. Now everyone knew that this rather strange interstellar monument was an American-funded project, and many delegates would refuse to co-operate or might even attempt to block the whole thing from happening for that reason alone. And what was with this free-and-easy, counterculture-esque idea for an open recording session anyway? That wouldn’t work. Not every UN diplomat was in town every day. What happened to all those people who happened not to be in on the day the recording took place? Pure chance would omit them, their culture and language from the record. Think of the political ramifications. Eventually, the only useful suggestion on the table was that Carl could record each one of the UN’s Outer Space Committee saying ‘hello’. But, as noted in William Poundstone’s Sagan biography, this would fail to achieve what they set out to do; while many different languages were represented by the members of the committee, there were sizeable gaps. There was no Chinese member, for example, and the committee was nearly all male. Then the committee revealed that they would first have to vote about the possibility of saying ‘hello’, and the next meeting was scheduled for late June, which was too late.

  If we equate Carl’s attempts to record greetings spoken by members of the UN to Carl buying a car, the situation was currently playing out like this: