The Vinyl Frontier

by Jonathan Scott

  Carl enters car dealership.

  Carl: ‘I’d like something with four doors and plenty of space. It needs to be a family car.’

  UN Outer Space Committee: ‘We have a two-seater convertible.’

  Carl: ‘Hmm. It’s not what I was after, but I’m desperate and short of time. It will have to do.’

  UN Outer Space Committee: ‘Great! I’ll get the paperwork. By the way were you hoping to drive it? It’s just this car doesn’t start.’

  At one point Carl was even asked if the launch could be postponed.

  ***

  Once Jon had found a space to work at Cornell, one of the first things he did was collate all the suggested topics into a master list. He wrote out these subjects on a large piece of white paper and taped it to the wall. Then he started looking through books and magazines. He writes: ‘I tried to open myself completely to the flood of images that passed across my desk, looking for those images that promoted themselves as candidates.’

  Jon and Wendy went on trips around Cornell and to local public libraries, plundering coffee-table and picture books like Birds of North America, the influential Family of Man and The Age of Steam. One of the Cornell staffers brought in about 20 years’ worth of National Geographic magazines back to 1958 that had been sitting in her garage, ‘unaware that their fate was to be perused and cut to pieces for our candidate file’.

  They had already decided to avoid politics and religion. Another important early decision was not to include artwork. Again, put yourself in their shoes and it seems a logical decision. They already had enough on their plate, choosing diagrams and photographs that were easy for aliens to interpret, without muddying the water with art. The casting net was quite wide enough, thank you very much. Plus, as Jon reasoned, human art was already being well represented over in the music section. The playlist was art. The pictures would be the factual bit.

  This ‘no art’ policy would also inform the choices of the photographs themselves. When you look through the Voyager Golden Record photographs today, the ones that made the final cut, some are undoubtedly beautiful – Ansel Adams’s ‘The Tetons and the Snake River’, for example22 – but many seem prosaic or utilitarian. This is precisely because the overriding factor was the information the image could convey, rather than any aesthetic value.

  Back in the Cornell work room, if Jon, Wendy or any of the others found an image that fitted one of the required topics, Jon noted down the location on his wall chart. ‘After a few days some topics had many candidates, others only one, some none at all … It was clear that the National Geographic Magazine represented a huge resource for us,’ he writes. ‘They do, month after month, the same thing we were attempting to do in creating a portrait of the lands and inhabitants of our planet.’

  Jon contacted the NGS office and, with the help of a picture editor named Jon Schneeberger, received permission to use the images as well as access to transparencies and even unpublished images from the magazine’s archives.23

  ‘As the images began to pile up, they began to sort themselves into groups. It was like creating a jigsaw puzzle, with a planet full of possible pieces. The [breadth of] considerations that guided the selection was a hall of mirrors, with a bewildering array of criteria for selection – technical, cognitive, political, aesthetic, financial, legal, practical … We mostly flew by the seat of our pants, selecting and rejecting candidate images case by case, letting the sequence grow itself.’

  Jon shared with me a photograph of his original wall chart. On it were noted a number of categories, with references to the images found so far that fitted the bill. So next to ‘12. Coast’, John had written ‘Hawaii Guide, Cover; Drama of the Oceans p.195; The Beautiful Land p.17; National Geographic Jan 1968, p.102–3; NGS October ’66, p.518–19; UN - Greek Boat’.

  They also contacted Tom Prendergast, the Picture Librarian at UN Headquarters in New York. ‘Tom spent two days helping me look through the photo library,’ Jon writes, ‘looking through their slide collection of images of people from around the world, trying to decide which citizens of Earth would take the big ride.’

  This approach to the project was shaped in part by a letter that sci-fi author Robert A. Heinlein had sent to Carl back in December 1976,24 which Carl had in turn shared with the team. It’s a long, thought-provoking letter, full of interesting ideas. Heinlein sets out his stall at the start. His intentions are – instead of offering the sort of ideas that Carl will already be receiving from other quarters – to offer unsound advice, illogical ideas, as wild as he could dream up, to play devil’s advocate. He wanted to test the walls of the room in which they were working, to put a stethoscope to their assumptions. He talks about senses that aliens might have that we don’t. He talks about precognition, he ruminates over the difficulties of communicating with some other intelligent being when there is no common cultural background.25 He critiques previous attempts at extraterrestrial communication, by radio, by geometrical diagrams, by ‘carefully built-up codes that establish a number system before branching into concepts assumed to be universal truths, such as atomic weights of elements’. He is plainly thinking at least in part of the Arecibo message, and he discloses that he – a human with shared cultural background, education and experience as a member of a Naval Code and Cipher Board – had never successfully managed to break these codes. ‘I found that I could always read them after I read the English explanation. Never before.’ His conclusion? That this message is not to extraterrestrials at all, but a time capsule for our descendants.

  Heinlein also questions the assumption that ET can see. A life form that evolved under a different sun might not be able to see in the same way we understand it. Human eyes, he writes, cannot see the ‘ruled grooves’ in a spectroscopic grating or the heat waves in a pitch-dark room, because we evolved here, beneath our sun. He suggests, therefore, that any message on a plaque should be ‘etched or grooved’ to be seen over as wide a range of the spectrum as possible, to cater for alien eyesight that operates outside the remit of what we call ‘visible light’.

  It’s a playful and provocative letter. I also note with interest two uses of the word ‘groove’ in fairly quick succession. And I wonder too, if Carl shared this document with Frank, whether it might have sent ‘grooves-vinyl-record’ word-association sparks firing through Frank’s brain. What’s without doubt is that the letter arrived at the Space Sciences Building at Cornell a few days before Christmas 1976, and Frank suggested his heavy-metal record in Honolulu in late January 1977. But whether Heinlein can claim any credit for the initial idea or not, his letter would certainly be enormously influential in guiding Jon’s thinking on the kinds of pictures they should be selecting for the record.

  ‘I was especially concerned by the idea that the concept of picture as we understand it may be mysterious to an alien,’ Jon writes. ‘We wanted the pictures to be understandable but we also wanted them to contain as much information as possible. Those two demands might be mutually exclusive.’

  Heinlein’s letter prompted Jon to focus on images where form follows function, where the look of the object should help the viewer understand what it is. A bicycle, for example, would be easier to understand than a car since the mechanics are all exposed. A radio telescope is shaped to catch and focus long wavelength radio waves, so its design is guided solely by that function.

  At one point Jon also sought the advice of Charles and Ray Eames. The Eames were famous not only for their industrial and furniture design, but for their whole approach to design. Maybe they could offer some insight into designing an interstellar message, Jon thought. He had watched their scientific film Powers of 10 over and over again when he had worked at the Ontario Science Center, and in 1975 he had built a large three-dimensional model galaxy for their astronomy display.

  ‘Every few hours I would take a break and wander to the kiosk where Powers of 10 was being shown on an endless loop,’ Jon writes. ‘The film started with a man sleeping on a blanket. Eac
h successive image was 10 times larger than the previous one, pulling back until the Earth, solar system, galaxy and known universe filled the frame. Then it dived back down to the sleeping man and continued in decreasing powers of 10, ending at the nucleus of an atom. This film itself inspired exactly the same kind of cosmic perspective that Carl so often urged. It seemed to have the germ of an idea for how material on the Voyager Record might be organized.’

  Jon called Charles. ‘I outlined our project and said I would very much appreciate his suggestions at how our image sequence might be envisioned.’ Charles was silent for just a moment, then he became really rather cross. How dare they do something like this. They should not be doing this. This should take years. This should involve a major international design committee – not just be thrown together in a last-minute rush!

  ‘Maybe,’ Jon countered, ‘but we have almost no money and no time.’

  Jon assured Charles they would do the best they could. Would he please help? Eames grew angrier. No, he would not help.

  #Click#

  During the course of the project Jon would make lots of calls. Some people didn’t believe him when he told them what they were up to. Others thought it was just a ‘silly waste of time’. One photographer’s agent said ‘this is the screwiest project I ever heard of,’ before genially granting him permission. ‘But Eames was the only one who got mad at us for even making the attempt,’ writes Jon.

  ***

  By now – between Jon and Wendy, Frank, Valentin Boriakoff, George Helou and Amahl Shakhashiri of NAIC – they more or less filled a room in the Space Sciences Building with books and magazines. The array of titles that would give up their wares to Voyager is one of the pleasures of the record’s story. If all the images had come from a single picture library, it might not have been so much fun. The fact that Voyager also serves as a snapshot of mid-century, mass-market and educational coffee-table publishing is a fact to be celebrated. There’s a picture of man using a drill (#96), for example, which comes from Gem Cutting by John Sinkankas,26 chosen as it shows in close-up a human figure using its hands to manipulate smaller objects. There’s a picture of Oxford (#91) from C.S. Lewis: Images of His World by Douglas R. Gilbert. There’s a picture of someone cooking fish, and a picture of a Chinese dinner party, both of which were found in two titles in the Time-Life ‘Foods of the World’ series. The picture of an eagle (#58) comes from the 1974 work Doñana: Spain’s Wildlife Wilderness. The photographs showing fertilised ova were taken from the 1965 work A Child is Born by Lennart Nilsson. The human-anatomy diagrams were adapted from The World Book Encyclopedia. The diagram of human reproductive organs comes from Life: Cells, Organisms, Populations by E.O. Wilson.

  As the team chose the photographs, they would slot them into a broadly evolutionary sequence. They wanted diverse landscapes, plants and animals, humans engaged in a wide range of activities, family and community, structures, agriculture, and the planet Earth itself as seen from space. At this point Jon still hoped the sound essay and pictures could work hand in glove, each aiding the interpretation of the other, although this was looking increasingly unlikely. So instead, he focused on how best to arrange the photographs.

  ‘We wanted to assemble them so there was an overarching story,’ he says. ‘And then within that story there are smaller stories, so that the individual components would make some kind of sense so you got the flow even if there was a piece or two that you couldn’t understand … So this is a sequence showing vehicles, for example. Well, if there’s one vehicle you couldn’t recognise – “you” being the extraterrestrial – if it was in a sequence of other vehicles, that would help you understand “oh, this must be some kind of vehicle”. Whereas if you just threw the pictures in a random assortment – if living things were mixed in with machines were mixed in with minerals – it might be harder for an alien reader to understand what was what.’

  However, as the hundreds of possible images piled up, a particularly knotty problem was now facing the picture team: scale. They felt they needed to give everything a scale. They wanted some of the photographs to include measurements in distance, in weight and even in time. But how would you do that? It would be no good adding a line and writing ‘10 centimetres’ next to it – that would be meaningless to an alien. They wouldn’t recognise what the symbols meant or what ‘cm’ stood for. How do you give a workable scale to an alien? How do you fix a scale of time, distance and weight in two dimensions, without any common language?

  ‘Frank? Frank! Get your butt in here!’

  Notes

  1 Carl shared with the group some input from University of Chicago expert Fred Eggens, who he had quizzed earlier in the day on the subject of Native American music.

  2 Jon Lomberg had already suggested using the Ella Fitzgerald–Louis Armstrong version.

  3 By the sound of it, Rachmaninoff was never really in the running.

  4 Spike-kicking Rosa Klebb in From Russia with Love (1963).

  5 Every number after the first two is the sum of the two preceding numbers.

  6 Another SETI mover-shaker.

  7 In Appendix D of Murmurs, you can peruse the tracks from Jon’s mixtape, designed for a one-hour record.

  8 They were both freelancers mixing radio programmes with engineer Lorne Tulk, and they had to type and Xerox their own scripts. Apparently Glenn operated the copy machine without removing his gloves.

  9 According to Brian Harker’s Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings (2011, Oxford University Press), the Hot Five band included Kid Ory (trombone), Johnny Dodds (clarinet), Johnny St Cyr (banjo), Louis’ wife Lil on piano, and usually no drummer. Over a 12-month period starting in November 1925, this quintet produced 24 records. The Hot Seven sessions took place in May 1927, producing a further 12 songs. The Seven line-up included the Hot Five lot (although John Thomas was now on trombone as Kid Ory was off touring), plus Baby Dodds (Johnny’s brother) on drums and Pete Briggs on tuba.

  10 Valya was born in 1942 in a hamlet near the village of Arda, Smolyan Province. She is a legend in her home country for her wide repertoire of Balkan folksongs.

  11 A bagpipe-like instrument.

  12 Charles Duvelle, who died in 2017, was born in Paris but spent most of his childhood in Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. He studied music at the Conservatoire de Paris, then in 1959 was hired to work with and record African radio programmes. He founded the Ocora label in 1962, which grew into one of the most extensive catalogues of recorded traditional music.

  13 The entire Folkways catalogue was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution in 1987, which today keeps every recording in print.

  14 The LP was compiled by the American composer, world-music expert and theorist Henry Cowell (1897-1965). Cowell would write about and experiment with harmonic rhythm – the rate chords change in relation to the rate of notes. Indeed in 1930 he commissioned Léon Theremin to invent the Rhythmicon – the first proto drum machine. Henry was raised by his mother, Clarissa Dixon, author of the early feminist novel Janet and Her Dear Phebe. Later in his career, and following a four-year stretch in San Quentin for illegal sexual acts, Cowell mentored many famous composers (including Burt Bacharach), also writing and compiling for Folkways Records.

  15 Apart from one adult male cricket, who was recorded showing off to a female by Dr Ronald R. Hoy at the Langmuir Laboratory at Cornell University.

  16 However, the sound essay section is preceded on the record by spoken-word greetings so, in fact, an alien listener would have heard human speech prior to the laughter in the sound essay.

  17 You can read Adrienne’s piece via theatlantic.com. It was published in mid-2017.

  18 A slightly unfair title as both men and women tend to share the hunting and gathering duties. Plus gathering (mainly mongongo nuts) provided a higher percentage of the diet than the macho hunting. Woman the Gatherer would have been better. Incidentally, Sagan would write about the !Kung way of life in 1995’s The Demon-Haunted World.

/>   19 An American archaeologist, best known for his excavations at the Neanderthal site at Shanidar Cave in Iraq.

  20 If you have ever taken part in any experimental archaeology – where archaeologists attempt to recreate some archaic working method in order to find out how an object was produced – then you’ll know that flint knapping is no walk in the park.

  21 Dogs also turn up in the picture sequence. As do the !Kung.

  22 Photographed at Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming in 1942.

  23 Of the 120 images in the Voyager sequence, 28 came from NGS.

  24 At the time he might well have been working on his gloriously pulpy romp The Number of the Beast, which came out in 1980.

  25 A theme he explored in his 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land about a born-and-raised Martian who comes to Earth.

  26 Frank is a keen gem cutter and this obscure volume came from his own library.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Hydrogen Key

  ‘The movements of the heavens are nothing except a certain ever-lasting polyphony – intelligible, not audible…’

  Johannes Kepler

  The first time Laurie Spiegel saw a synth was in 1969. She was in Morton Subotnick’s studio above the Bleeker Street Cinema, Manhattan. It was love at first sight. It was an original Buchla 100, the very instrument Mort had used to record Silver Apples of the Moon 1 two years before. It was an epiphany for Spiegel. Mort moved west, but the Buchla stayed in the city, ending up at a basement studio at the NYU Film School. Laurie continued to use it, but gradually grew frustrated with its limitations. Then in 1973 she began working at Bell Telephone Laboratories, giving her access to computers that allowed much more ‘complex, reproducible and stable control of sound’.

  The only original electronic ‘music’ aboard Voyager is a piece called ‘Music of the Spheres’, positioned at the start of the ‘Sounds of Earth’ sound essay. It is essentially a fabric made of ever-changing computer-generated tones, each one representing a planet’s orbit rising and falling as it circumnavigates the Sun. It was inspired by Johannes Kepler’s 17th-century tract Harmonices Mundi 2 (The Harmony of the World), in which, alongside a third law of planetary motion,3 he imagined the movements of the planets as a series of voices, singing polyphonically.