Murmurs of Earth

by Carl Sagan

  Wu (China) 43

  Xhosa (S. Africa) 5

  Yi (China) 4

  Yiddish6 Yoruba (W. Africa) 13

  Zhuang7 (China) Zulu (S. Africa) 6

  We were principally concerned with the needs of people on Earth during this section of the recording. We recorded messages from populations all over the globe, each representative speaking in the language of his or her people, instead of sending greetings in one or two languages accompanied by keys for their decipherment. We were aware that the latter alternative might have given the extraterrestrials a better chance of understanding the words precisely, though it would have raised the thorny question of which two languages to send. We felt it was fitting that Voyager greet the universe as a representative of one community, albeit a complex one consisting of many parts. At least the fact that many different languages are represented should be clear from the very existence of a set of short statements separated by pauses and from internal evidence—such as the initial greeting “Namaste,” which begins many of the greetings from the Indian subcontinent. The greetings are an aural Gestalt, in which each culture is a contributing voice in the choir. After all, by sending a spaceship out of our solar system, we are making an effort to de-provincialize, to rise above our nationalistic interests and join a commonwealth of space-faring societies, if one exists.

  We made a special effort to record those languages spoken by the vast majority of the world’s inhabitants. Since all research and technical work on the record had to be accomplished within a period of weeks, we began with a list of the world’s most widely spoken languages, which was provided by Dr. Steven Soter of Cornell. Carl suggested that we record the twenty-five most widely spoken languages. If we were able to accomplish that, and still had time, we would then try to include as many other languages as we could.

  The organization of recording sessions and the arduous legwork involved in finding, contacting and convincing individual speakers was handled by Shirley Arden, Carl’s executive assistant, Wendy Gradison, then Carl’s editorial assistant, Dr. Steven Soter, and me. The master table, reproduced on this page, which shows each of the languages, the speaker’s name, their comments in the original language, an English translation, and the real and fractional number of human beings who speak that language, was largely Shirley’s idea. We contacted various members of the Cornell language departments, who cooperated with us on very short notice and provided numerous speakers, even though school was ending and many people were leaving for summer vacations. Other speakers were more difficult to find. Sometimes it meant sitting for hours, telephoning friends of friends who might know someone who could speak, let’s say, the Chinese Wu dialect. After finding such a person, we had to determine whether he or she would be available during the hours when the recording sessions had been scheduled. Even while the recording sessions were going on, we were still trying to find and recruit speakers of languages not yet represented. Often people waiting to record would suggest names of individuals fluent in the very languages we were looking for. Immediately we called these people, explained the project and our plight, and asked them to come at once. Many people did just that.

  Bishun Khare, a senior physicist in the Laboratory for Planetary Studies, was responsible almost singlehandedly for the participation of the Indian speakers. He personally called friends and members of the Cornell Indian community, explained the undertaking to them, and asked for and received their cooperation.

  There were only a few disappointments, where someone had agreed to come to a recording session, could not and forgot to let us know in time for us to make other arrangements. It wasn’t always possible to find replacements at the last minute, so there are some regrettable omissions—Swahili is one.

  The greetings were recorded in two sessions in the administration building of Cornell University. The first session was recorded on June 8, 1977, by Joe Leeming of Cornell’s Public Relations Department. While one person was being recorded, the others waited in a connecting office just outside the studio. Leeming left the audio speakers in the office on so that the people who were about to record could actually hear the voice of the person being recorded in the studio. This led to a warm feeling of camaraderie and excitement among the participants. The second recording session took place on June 13, and was recorded by Cornell film-maker David Gluck and his assistant Michael Bronfenbrenner.

  Voyager has been compared to a bottle with a note inside tossed over the railing of a ship at sea. It is, though the bottle is custom-built and the note scribbled in computer instead of pencil. We are tossing our bottle into the void of the sky. Whether it will ever be found by someone walking on a galactic beach will not be known by our generation. Our distant progeny will have this to look forward to.

  * * *

  1 One of the fifteen languages of the Constitution of India.

  2 Here considered a group of dialects.

  3 See Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu, Min and Hakka. The “national language” (Guoyu) or “common speech” (Putonghua) is a standardized form of Mandarin as spoken in the area of Peking.

  4 Hindi and Urdu are essentially the same language, Hindustani. As the official language of India, it is written in the Devanagari script and called Hindi. As the official language of Pakistan, it is written in a modified Arabic script and called Urdu.

  5 Thai includes Central, Southwestern, Northern and Northeastern Thai. The distinction between Northeastern Thai and Lao is political rather than linguistic.

  6 Yiddish is usually considered a variant of German, though it has its own standard grammar, dictionaries, and a highly developed literature, and is written in Hebrew characters. Speakers number about 3 million.

  7 A group of Thai-like dialects with about 9 million speakers.

  Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.

  —Shakespeare, The Tempest

  The twelve-minute sound essay was conceived for two audiences: the human and the extraterrestrial In the former, we hoped to evoke smiles of recognition, and in the latter, a sense of the variety of auditory experiences that are part of life on Earth. We wanted to use the microphone as the ear’s camera in further enhancing Voyager’s portrait of our planet and ourselves.

  The world of our imagined extraterrestrials would be the result of a vastly different pattern of what Darwin described as “life’s ever-branching and beautiful ramifications.” The murmurs of such a place would be very unlike our own, and we might reasonably expect to share with its inhabitants only a few of the most fundamental geological, meteorological and possibly technological idioms. Indeed, the very idea of distinguishing between “musical” and “nonmusical” sounds posed a problem. We realized that elsewhere in the universe such a distinction would be even more blurred that it is here; perhaps cricket songs, a gavotte and the harbor-filling bray of an ocean liner’s foghorn would seem of a piece to alien senses. Because we could not know how the message would be perceived by them, we decided to risk some fairly flagrant localisms in the interest of presenting as much about ourselves as possible.

  The process of selecting the sounds began outside of Ithaca, New York, on a bright spring day that was auspiciously abuzz with wild May country noises. Timothy Ferris, Wendy Gradison and I joined the Sagans at their dining-room table for a vigorous round of group onomatopoeia. We tried to think of every sound we’d ever heard, and I wrote most of them down. On the following day I returned to New York City and set about trying to locate the best examples of each. I started by phoning sound libraries and universities all over North America.

  “I understand that you have the finest recordings of croaking frogs” or “the meanest hyenas” or “the most devastating earthquake. How would I go about obtaining a copy?”

  “For what purpose?” was the standard response.

  “We’re sending a record into interstellar space,” I’d reply in what I judged to be my least manic voice. “And I’m trying to put together a suit
e of the sounds that we hear on Earth.” This usually meant some empty long-distance static while I reeled off the corroborative phone numbers of federal agencies and well-known scientists. A great deal of skepticism was duly expressed, but not one person hung up before they’d heard the whole story.

  And some of them were instantly engaged by the notion of Voyager’s grand reach across space and time. Dr. Roger Payne of Rockefeller University was such a person. He was very excited by our desire to extend whale greetings on the record. When I told him that as a long overdue gesture of respect for these intelligent co-residents of Earth, we wished to include their salutations among those of the statesmen and diplomats, he was thrilled.

  “Proper respect!” he cried. “Who is this? Oh, at last! Wonderful! You can have anything I have. I’ll bring it to you myself. The most beautiful whale greeting was one we heard off the coast of Bermuda in 1970. That’s the one that should last forever. Please send that one.”

  When we heard the tape, we were enchanted by its graceful exuberance, a series of expanding exultations so free and communicative of another way of moving and being on Earth. We listened to it many times and always with a feeling of irony that our imagined extraterrestrials of a billion years hence might grasp a message from fellow earthlings that had been incomprehensible to us.

  Alan Botto of Princeton, New Jersey, was another friend of the project. Fred Durant of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum told me to call Mr. Botto for the “best rocket launch you ever heard.” It turned out to be a rousing Saturn 5 lift-off recorded in a highly passionate Mission Control room, with a countdown, ignition roar, cheers, applause and the heartfelt wish “Fly, bird” blurted out by a man momentarily overwhelmed by what people can do. Botto also supplied us with a great hurtling freight train.

  When I reached Mickey Kapp, president of Warner Special Products, he was in Rome on his vacation. A space enthusiast for many years, Mr. Kapp spoke of Jupiter and Saturn as if they were stations on an old commute. “Why, sure,” he said from his room at the Excelsior to mine on West 74th, “you’re welcome to all our sounds. Take as many as you want.” He placed the entire Elektra Sound Archives at our disposal and hand-delivered the cuts we selected. It would have been impossible to complete the sound essay in such as short time without his very kind cooperation.

  Some of the people who declined to participate cited their mistrust of any endeavor sponsored by the government. Others wanted substantial amounts of money in return for a moment’s whoosh of the breeze through the trees or the rush of a river. We couldn’t afford to give them much more than the cost of a reel of tape and return postage. One man who was reputed to have a wonderful collection of children’s street cries threw me out of his office, shouting after me that NASA “had some nerve sending a little girl to talk to a big soundman like me.” But almost everyone else was very nice and eager for a dab of the immortality that Voyager’s unique passage to millions of years from now seemed to confer.

  Timothy Ferris and I went to Washington, D.C., to meet with the Sagans and Murry Sidlin for a series of late-night musical repertoire conferences. During the day we visited the headquarters of the National Geographic Society, where we found some huffy orangutan grunts. We also went to the Library of Congress’ Archive of Recorded Sound. It was there that we heard a terrible sound.

  When we arrived, an engineer was waiting for us with a supermarket shopping cart full of records, some in jackets and others in torn manila sleeves. The engineer told us not to touch them. As he went through them, we were to point to the cuts that we wished to hear. Somewhere in among the wolves and the brine shrimp was a heavy lacquer disc of what is believed to be the first field recording ever made during a battle: an ugly repeating loop of a World War I skirmish in France with an American soldier urging a mustard-gas grenade launcher to fire. The soldier’s voice seems horribly cheerful and thoughtless, as mechanical a sound as the answering hiccup of the poison canister. It drones at us from across sixty years, and Tim and I try to see what this man must have been seeing, but all we can manage is bits of war stolen from movies and some smoke.

  We try to stop hearing it all day long. It’s so tainting that we both hesitate before mentioning it to the others at dinner. This leads us into a discussion of just exactly how realistic a picture of life on Earth we wished to convey. Was the Voyager message to be a historical gesture or merely a social one?

  Murry was adamant that we should send only the best of ourselves. And while none of us was absolutely convinced that the record would be incomplete without so vivid a demonstration of our imperfection as our violence, there was a feeling that being truthful was important in ways that might be momentarily obscured by culture. Most of the cherished beliefs of the previous decade turned flimsy in this one. And even now the prejudices of this particular moment lose their currency and change into something else. When we contemplated Voyager’s inconceivable future, composed of maybe a million times ten years or sixty years, we despaired at knowing what the citizens of that age would understand or prize. If we showed ourselves as we really are, a species involved with struggle, wouldn’t we at least be assured of the record’s value as an accurate document?

  We failed to come to any conclusion that evening. Instead, we drifted back into the debate about the musical repertoire. The next day Tim and I flew back to New York City and took my father to a Mets game. There were roughly sixty thousand people making noise at Shea Stadium. Several times I found myself shutting my eyes as tightly as I could to see what I could hear.

  A week later, we had the fifty sounds we’d been looking for and we were ready to begin our work in the studio that CBS had provided for us. Our sound engineer was a calm, rusty-haired man in his early fifties named Russ Payne. He is a very patient man, a student of the Jain philosophy who speaks with a cowboy accent. During our breaks he would eat a piece of fruit, smoke a cigarette and talk about the life of the spirit. When we got to the part of the tape with the locomotive on it, he told us that his daddy has been an engineer and had taken him on some trains that sounded just like that one.

  A rock-and-roll sound prodigy from Brooklyn named Jimmy Iovine showed up a couple of times to raise the levels on the elephants and to check out the surf. He was very anxious to have a photograph taken of himself in front of the rocket ship. He said he wanted to give it to his mother. But the task of engineering the sound essay fell entirely to Russ and Tim. They used a sixteen-track Ampex.

  There were many helpful suggestions made, most notably Tim’s and Jon Lomberg’s, as to how the sounds should be organized within the essay. I felt that it would be most informative to arrange them chronologically. We took many liberties within that very broad structure, but the fundamental direction of the montage is evolutionary: from the geological through the biological into the technological.

  Since horsecarts, chopping wood, the hiss of bus brakes, and other sounds of our era take up as much time on the record as the rippling of primeval ponds, the sequence is open to the criticism that it, like our written history, vastly overemphasizes the last few thousand years at the expense of the millions that preceded them in the chronicle of our species. But if the sounds in the essay accurately reflected the time scale of Earth’s four-and-a-half-billion-year story, all but the last few moments would have been only the gurgle of waves and the whisper of wind across barren plains; mammals would have to roar out all they had to roar in a few seconds, and the proud accomplishments of all human civilization would have expired in a single beep of Morse code. If the denizens of a distant planet can make sense of the essay—and arguably it may be the easiest part of the record for an alien intelligence to relate to—perhaps they will not be wholly unacquainted with the paradoxes time engenders, and will listen in a tolerant spirit.

  Here are the Sounds of the Earth in sequential order:

  1. Music of the Spheres

  The essay begins with the giddy whirl of tones reflecting the motions of the Sun�
�s planets in their orbits—a musical readout of Johannes Kepler’s Harmonica Mundi, the sixteenth-century mathematical tract whose echoes may still be found in the formulas that make Voyager possible. Kepler’s concept was realized on a computer at Bell Telephone Laboratories by composer Laurie Spiegel in collaboration with Yale professors John Rogers and Willie Ruff. Each frequency represents a planet; the highest pitch represents the motion of Mercury around the Sun as seen from Earth; the lowest frequency represents Jupiter’s orbital motion. Inner planets circle the Sun more swiftly than outer planets. The particular segment that appears on the record corresponds to very roughly a century of planetary motion. Kepler was enamored of a literal “music of the spheres,” and I think he would have loved their haunting representation here.

  2. Volcanoes, Earthquakes and Thunder

  A series of rumblings to signify the dramatic upheavals of our planet’s early history, including a rare tape of a 1971 Australian earthquake, obtained from Dr. David Simpson of the Lamont-Doherty Geological Laboratories. Most of the Earth’s atmosphere is thought to have been outgassed through volcanoes, fumaroles and cracks in the surface of our planet in the first few hundred million years of geological time. Chemical reactions induced by solar ultraviolet light and electrical storms initiated a sequence of chemical reactions that led eventually to the origin of life.

  3. Mud Pots

  Geological gurgling sounds similar to the glub-glub of chocolate pudding on a stove—suggestive, we hoped, of simmering life.

  4. Wind, Rain and Surf

  A momentary evocation of the hundreds of millions of years when these were the only Sounds of Earth, with special emphasis on the oceans as the scene of our origins. The oceans themselves were outgassed from the Earth’s interior.