Murmurs of Earth

by Carl Sagan

5. Crickets, Frogs

  Intended to betoken the debut of vociferous life on earth, most of these sounds were taken from the CBS library, with the exception of one adult male cricket, Teleogryllus oceanicus, who is performing a solo serenade to the females. He was recorded by Dr. Ronald R. Hoy at the Langmuir Laboratory at Cornell University.

  6. Birds, Hyena and Elephant

  A chorus of creatures to suggest the developing varieties of fauna as Earth gets really busy with life.

  7. Chimpanzee

  The voice of a lone primate rises above the others and seems to screech its mad announcement of a new consciousness.

  8. Wild Dog

  A lonely baying that reverberates with the dangers and uncertainties of our beginnings.

  9. Footsteps, Heartbeats and Laughter

  A human being makes its first appearance, walking erect with its hands free to change the world.

  10. Fire and Speech

  Humans begin to use fire to alter their environment, and the hearth becomes, perhaps, the site of the birth of language and culture. The words are those of Professor Richard Lee of the University of Toronto extending greetings in the !Kung language of the Kalahari Bushmen, one of the last representatives of the hunter-gatherer societies that sustained the human endeavor for almost all our several-million-year history. A photograph of Bushman hunters is included as item 60 of the picture sequence.

  11. The First Tools

  Our upright posture left our hands free for manipulating the environment. A critical moment in human history occurred when the first stone tools were made out of soft rock more than two million years ago. Enormous numbers of stone-cutting, flaking, penetrating and pounding tools are found in many paleolithic sites. We wished to include the sound of stone on stone, of stone tools in the course of being fashioned. Carl walked the streets of midtown New York in a poignant effort to find two suitable rocks; not only were there no suitable rocks, there were no rocks of any sort to be found. He called Alexander Marshack of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard for recommendations on a source of soft rock and a short description of the method of manufacturing stone tools. Linda Sagan then obtained appropriate flint samples from Dr. Ralph Solecki of the Department of Anthropology, Columbia University, who also provided thick gloves and goggles: flint is sharp, and there must have been many accidents attendant to the ancient manufacture of tools. The record includes this satisfying sound of flint fracturing and crumbling when struck sharply with another rock. Some of the results would have made adequate, although rudimentary, knives and spears.

  12. Tame Dog

  The dog is heard to bark again, but this time all traces of menace are gone; animals have been domesticated. Almost every sound that follows on the essay is the result of human activity. Dogs are represented as items 43, 61 and 68 of the picture sequence.

  13. Herding Sheep, Blacksmith Shop, Sawing, Tractor and Riveter

  A suite of agricultural and construction sounds. We tested several roosters and cows, but they all sounded terribly stagy.

  14. Morse Code

  When it came time to decide what message within the message we would be sending in Morse code, Carl immediately suggested Ad astra per aspera—To the stars through difficulties. William R. Schoppe, Jr. (WB2FWS), a ham radio operator at CBS, was kind enough to tap it out for us.

  15. Ships, Horse and Cart, Train, Truck, Tractor, Bus, Automobile, F-111 Flyby, Saturn 5 Lift-Off

  A great many human miles are covered in this transportation sequence. The horse and cart start out on a dirt road and end up on a paved one. The transition modes from there on come very quickly and reflect accurately the astonishing pace of progress in the development of transportation over the last hundred years. The train and the supersonic aircraft convey in stereo a satisfying sense of motion. This sequence roughly parallels pictures 102, 105, and 113.

  16. Kiss

  This wonderful sound proved to be the most difficult to record. We were under strict orders from NASA to keep it heterosexual, and within such a constraint we tried every permutation we could think of without success. Jimmy Iovine happened to show up that day, and he was most anxious to produce a believable kiss by sucking his arm. But this was to be that impossible thing, a kiss that would last forever, and we wanted it to be real. After many unusable kisses that were either too faint or too smacky, Tim kissed me softly on the cheek; it felt and sounded fine.

  17. Mother and Child

  The very first cries of an infant and the stilling of a six-month-old’s cries by his mother were provided for us through the courtesy of Dr. Margaret Bullowa and Dr. Lise Menn of M.I.T.

  18. Life Signs

  We know that EEG patterns register some changes in thought. Would it be possible, I wondered, for a highly advanced technology of several million years from now to decipher my thoughts? On the chance that it might be, I contacted Dr. Julius Korein of the New York University Medical Center, and with Tim’s help we set up a recording session for my innermost self. Using a medical-data recorder attached to an audiotape recorder, I was left to meditate alone in a room for an hour while the workings of my brain, heart, eyes and muscles were being recorded. A short segment of the graphs of my vital signs appears below.

  Despite the fact that there was only a tiny chance that my mind would ever be read in this way, the course of my thoughts seemed to me to be worthy of serious consideration. I made a sort of mental itinerary of the ideas and individuals of history whose memory I hoped to perpetuate, and with the exception of a couple of irrepressible facts of my own life, I managed to stick to it pretty well. The hour was electronically compressed into a minute, and it is a fierce sound, something like a string of exploding firecrackers.

  19. Pulsar

  The concluding moment of the essay sounds ironically like the rasp of a phonograph needle left to languish unattended at the end of a record. It is in fact a recording of a quickly varying natural radio source some 600 light-years away from us and designated CP1133. It was provided for us by Frank Drake and Amahl Shakhashiri of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center. The regularity of the pulsar beat was considered, when the first pulsar was discovered, to be a sign of intelligent life (although we now know that pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars). My recorded life signs sound a little like recorded radio static from the depths of space. The electrical signatures of a human being and a star seem, in such recordings, not so different, and symbolize our relatedness and indebtedness to the cosmos.

  Nineteen hundred years ago Horace wrote that “words challenge eternity.” The fact that we recall his epigram proves him right. We have no way of knowing how much of this beautiful planet will have been obliterated long before Voyager ceases its wandering; how many of the voices celebrated on this record will have been silenced forever by our carelessness or merely by time. Voyager moves among the stars, bearing its cargo of echoes and images, and, in the logic of such distances, it keeps us alive.

  As the eyes are framed for astronomy so the ears are framed for the movements of harmony.

  —Plato, Republic

  Music is the harmony of heaven and earth.

  —Chinese musical text Yueh-chi, second century B.C.

  I. Choosing the Music

  * * *

  The world’s music—from the sun chants of ancient Egypt and the “celestial orchestras” of the Buddhists to the frequency with which the words “moon” and “stars” crop up in Western popular songs—is dotted with themes inspired by the sights of the night skies, when the sun withdraws and we are permitted to view the broader scheme of things. Now eighty-seven and a half minutes of music have been dispatched to the stars, aboard Voyager, as if in token payment against that debt of inspiration. We wanted to send music of a quality compatible with the elegance of such a heritage, and with enough variety to hint at something of the diversity of Earth’s peoples.

  In the service of this ambition, we established two criteria. First, contributions from a wide range of c
ultures should be included, not just music familiar to the society that launched the spacecraft. Second, nothing should be included out of merely dutiful concerns; every selection should touch the heart as well as the mind. As the musicologist Robert Brown wrote early in the project, “If we don’t send things we passionately care for, why send them at all?”

  We recognized that we could hope to meet the first criterion imperfectly at best. In addition to our own cultural biases and the time constraints of the record, we had to contend with the sharp drop in information that imposes itself when one looks beyond one’s own culture. Thousands of recordings of Bach’s music are available in the West, but only a few recordings of Georgian choruses or African pygmy songs; we have the benefit of many examples of the virtuosity of Glenn Gould, but almost none of the work of the Chinese ch’in player Kuan P’ing-hu; our appreciation of Stravinsky is aided by his writing, but the words of the composers of Javanese gamelan music are lost. Earth may be one of many worlds, but it also contains many worlds.

  To the extent that we succeeded in presenting music of non-Western cultures—half of the Voyager record is theirs—we owe our success to the cooperation of Brown, Alan Lomax and other friends and advisers. Only a handful of persons devote themselves to recording and understanding the music of societies remote from their own. Most work with inadequate funds, in a climate of indifference born of the misapprehension that the art of one’s own culture is better than that of others.

  The second criterion, that we feel deeply about all we put on the record, naturally produced differences of opinion. Some of us were more moved by classical music, East and West, than by what is called “folk” music. Others felt the opposite way. All those involved in selecting the music—the core personnel were Carl and Linda Sagan, novelist Ann Druyan and me, but at various times the committee involved a number of others—lost some favorite piece along the way: Carl had championed a piece by Debussy, Alan Lomax a quiet song by a Sicilian sulfur miner, I Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue. The latter two lost out because of time problems, the former by virtue of a decision in the case of Western classical music to concentrate on several compositions by the same composers, Bach and Beethoven, in hopes of facilitating “decoding” by extraterrestrial listeners. Any disappointment over music excluded was compensated by excitement over music included; to select from all the world’s music is to realize dreams of harmless plunder.

  The decision to cut the record at 16⅔ revolutions per minute rather than 33⅓ tripling the amount of time available for music, came rather late in the project, with the result that everything had to be chosen and assembled within less than two months. In soliciting suggestions, we found ourselves in the position of saying we were putting together a record that would last a billion years, but needed ideas today. People proved understanding, and proffered hundreds of recordings. Some of these promptly established themselves in the repertoire—for example, Surshri Kesar Bai Kerkar’s performance of the Indian raga, recommended independently by two musicologists, and the ch’in composition “Flowing Streams.” We were still making choices hours before the record was cut. At the last minute Carol Kulig had located the Georgian chorus “Tchakrulo,” which everyone recognized would be an excellent substitute for a far more derivative piece of Soviet music that had persisted in the repertoire for weeks. The problem was that “Tchakrulo” is sung in Georgian. None of us could understand the words. Lomax located a Georgian living in Queens, a gracious gentleman named Sandro Baratheli, who came to the studio on the morning when the lacquer masters of the record were to be cut. He listened to the song. Lighting a cigarette, he discoursed on the folk music of East Georgia. It was fascinating, but engineers were waiting upstairs in the cutting room, and when they were through, the masters had to be flown immediately to Los Angeles to be made into metal discs to go on the spacecraft.

  “Yes, Mr. Baratheli,” we interrupted, “but what do the words say?”

  Baratheli was not to be rushed. He had a healthy Georgian disdain for American urgency. Eventually he explained that the words constituted a protest by peasants against a local landowner. The song was spirited and undoctrinaire, in the Georgian tradition of tough-minded independence. We jumped up with signs of relief—it was an old song, and for all we knew could have celebrated bear-baiting—the engineer spliced the tape onto the master reel and we went upstairs.

  The record imposed unusual demands on engineers in the cutting studio. To inscribe the data of the photographs into the grooves with minimum distortion, a Honeywell data recorder was plugged directly into the cutting board. The day before, it had been discovered that the photographic data ran ten minutes longer than expected. The problem was solved in telephone calls with Frank Drake and Honeywell engineers, during which we worked out a method of inscribing two channels of picture data simultaneously, one on either wall of the record’s stereo groove. Even with this improvement, timings were close, and not until the first lacquer was complete were we certain that the computer-driven cutting lathe, reprogrammed to work at half speed, could squeeze everything onto the disc.1

  When the masters had been cut, an engineer etched into the space between the lead-out grooves near the center a dedication written a month before on the back of a manila envelope during one of our listening sessions: “To the makers of music—all worlds, all times.”

  Sometimes I wonder whether other spacecraft with artifacts aboard, the products of other civilizations, are drifting among the stars. It would be rather surprising if in the ten or fifteen billion years of our galaxy’s history we were the only creatures ever to have launched interstellar spacecraft. In any event it is pleasing to think that ours was the planet, or one of the planets, that chose to dispatch music.

  We don’t know whether human music will mean anything to nonhuman intelligences on other planets. But any creature who comes across Voyager and recognizes the record as an artifact can realize that it was dispatched with no hope of return. That gesture may speak more clearly than music. The record says: However primitive we seem, however crude this spacecraft, we knew enough to envision ourselves citizens of the cosmos. It says: However small we were, something in us was large enough to want to reach out to discoverers unknown, in times when we shall have perished or have changed beyond recognition. It says: Whoever and whatever you are, we too once lived in this house of stars, and we thought of you.

  II. The Music Bach

  * * *

  The musical culture of which Bach was beneficiary and greatest exemplar arose from the codification of music, the organization of institutions to train and support musicians, the perfection of such major instruments as church organs and the violin, and the successful incorporation, within this structure, of musical influences arriving from as far away as Asia. Its roots were to be found in a folk music that had sprung up almost as naturally as, and not independently of, the harvests of European farms. From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, music was channeled and refined and put to the service of human edification, almost as we today garner and refine oil from wells. The result was one of the most musically organized societies the world has ever seen. Every court, church and university of any consequence in Bach’s day proclaimed itself in music.

  We see through the lens of Bach’s art both his and older times. Looking backward, Bernard Jacobson writes: “What really lies behind Bach’s writing is a whole polyphonic tradition rooted in the choral masterpieces of the sixteenth century, of Palestrina and his school. These in turn have their origin, on the liturgical side, in the ancient system of Georgian tomes and, on the secular side, in the medieval manifestations of European folk-music.” Looking forward, we find that Bach’s sense of analysis and organization, his desire to get at the root of everything in music and set it down on paper, precursed strains that run through our art and our whole society today. He was so coolly calculating in theory that his music still sounds modern, and a piano player today can get away with the parlor trick of representing a Bach composition as
something new.

  The two strains, new and old, represent themselves today in a seesaw preference for the “mind” as against the “heart” of Bach. The mind is championed regularly, in musicological analyses that might have pure mathematics as their subject rather than music. The heart is championed in more emotional language, as in these words by the harpsichordist Wanda Landowska: “Let us not be afraid of the supreme contrapuntal sciences of the fugues, nor be overawed by the stern appearance and heavy wig of Father Bach. Let us gather around him, feel the love, the noble goodness that flow from each one of his phrases and that envigorate and bind us by ties strong and warm.”

  The process of consolidation that made Bach’s music possible goes on today, not only in art but in other fields, including the technology that made Voyager possible. Humans have yet to decide whether it is a good thing. The rise of art music in Germany gave the nobility Haydn, Telemann, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, but nearly killed off the folk music of the untitled. Today one branch of technology (radio and the phonograph record) has made art music available to ordinary people, while other branches exploit natural resources of the many in the service of a few. It may not be too far-fetched to suggest that those who think this a worthwhile bargain are inclined toward Bach’s “mind,” while those who suspect we are on the wrong path look to Bach’s “heart.” From either perspective he is a nearly universal composer, at least in earthly terms. Three of his compositions went aboard Voyager.

  Prelude and Fugue in C from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2

  By Bach’s day, the capacities of the system of tuning traditionally in use had come to be strained by refinements in musical instruments and by the practice of assembling growing numbers of musicians to perform works of increasing complexity. Pythagorean tuning, a legacy of the Greeks, worked well for melodies and for harmonies played in a few keys, but the more ambitious Baroque composers found it fettering.