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Visual & Performing Arts
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English (U.S.)
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Analyze the Musical Playlist on Voyager’s Golden Record

Essay Instructions:

Carl Sagan's project weaves together all of the threads we've discussed in this course: the construction and projection of individual identity and the interactions of individuals with each other and within cultures, and the interactions of cultures more broadly. In this case, the culture is not tied to ethnicity or taste, but to our very humanity.
Your assignment, then, is to analyze this musical playlist (https://open(dot)spotify(dot)com/user/ulyssestone/playlist/6pcuzwZSIw7OgL149bgJmZ) in any way you find plausible and compelling, using any or all of the tools or insights. While you should focus primarily on the music on these records, you are also free to consider the Golden Record's inclusion of images, sounds, and spoken language (but are not obliged to).
Do not feel obliged to comment on every track on this playlist; there's no need to create an "annotated playlist" or anything like that. Instead, think about the playlist as a whole and the ways in which the topics we discussed in this course can be used to make sense of that playlist. Likewise, there's no need to try to apply every single course topic; instead, choose a few "entry points" that seem fruitful to you.
You might wish to consider questions such as:
What does this playlist communicate, whether intentionally or unintentionally?
Sagan's committee obviously could not include music that wasn't yet written, so are there tracks on the Golden Record that you would replace with something written since 1977? If so, what would you drop? (Assume that the overall length of the record cannot be expanded by more than a minute or two.)
In what way(s) does this music have meaning? For us, as humans; for you, individually; for an unknown alien civilization?
Does this "pastiche" approach make the most sense (i.e., including music from a number of different cultures)? It is the most representative, to be sure, but should Sagan's committee have taken a different approach?
You need not answer these specific questions, and are free to approach this analysis from whatever point of view you feel is most fruitful. Your analysis will be assessed by (1) the degree to which it incorporates and applies the perspectives and tools we've explored over the past eleven weeks; and (2) the quality of the insights. Ultimately, it is up to you to decide how best to do this!
This assignment is weighted about TWICE as much as previous weekly assignments, so be sure to devote an appropriate amount of time to it.
You should aim to write about 1000–1500 words to fulfill the requirements of this assignment.

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Analyzing The Musical Playlist on Voyager’s Golden Record
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Analyzing The Musical Playlist on Voyager’s Golden Record
In 1977, two spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were sent by NASA on similar missions to reconnoiter the outer expanses of the solar system and beyond. Each Voyager was fitted with a Golden Record, conceived as a greeting and an expression of both the planet and humanity to any space-wonderers who may chance upon them. Within the grooves of the Golden Record were almost one and a half hours of music carefully chosen by a committee of scholars, musicologists, conductors, and scientists led by the late Carl Sagan.
The disc contained various compositions by Mozart, Stravinsky, Blind Willie Johnson, Bach, Beethoven, Chuck Berry, Louis Armstrong, and a laudable assortment of songs from Solomon Island panpipes to Benin percussion that could be categorized as "world music." Moreover, the Golden Record also contained a lovely audio poem entailing various natural sounds (ranging from an elephant’s trumpet to an avalanche), more than 100 pictures encoded in analog that illustrate our planet and our civilization, together with spoken greetings in 54 human languages and one from humpback whales.
The playlist was intended to tell the story of our planet and its myriad peoples and eras to any extraterrestrial intelligence that might come across it long after our existing civilization is gone. It is a time capsule that captures the essence of humanity and our civilizations and a plaque that appeals and expands the human spirit to the cosmos. The Golden Record was not the first attempt at communicating humans to other extraterrestrial civilizations. Similar attempts had already been made in the early 1970s when the first interstellar probes were launched together with scientific information in textual form, including a sketch of two specimens of the human species saluting the universe with hope CITATION Pop14 \l 1033 (Popova, 2014).
However, instead of sending another textual plaque, Sagan’s committee determined that a phonograph record of the same weight could carry more information about the spectrum view of humanity within its grooves. While previous messages contained information about what humans think and perceive, there is much more to our species than thought or perception. Expressing our emotional lives is much more challenging, especially to beings who are likely to possess a very different biological makeup CITATION Nys19 \l 1033 (Nystedt, 2019). Music was the most conceivable way of conveying human emotions. By analyzing the various songs on the Golden Record, an intelligent extraterrestrial species may gather a lot more information about humans than from texts or images.
The approximately 90 minutes of music, selected from various cultures around the globe, is a vehicle of expression of emotions and ideas not effectively revealed in familiar discourse. It is not only a critical vision of the human condition but also a universal language. The idea that music captures something fundamental about what it means to be human is well-founded in Western culture, from Socrates to Nietzsche. Music has also long been intertwined with the heavens, and man has always wo...
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