The Vinyl Frontier Read online

  The nature of the project was organic, with an expanding brief, no rigid remits, and a feverish pace. In May and June 1977 there was a lot going on, and for the next few chapters of our story this is going to be reflected by a certain amount of hopping about.

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  You’ll recall that Frank’s initial 14-point plan included sounds of Times Square among the suggested audio tracks. As the record concept took shape, so this aspect of the project expanded, eventually becoming a distinct chapter within the final record – a sample of Earth’s natural and human-made sounds.

  Jon had already lobbied hard for Mozart, as we know, and would submit a full hour-long tracklist in time. But now Carl asked him to send over some ideas for the proposed sound essay. Jon was working on documentary pieces for Canadian public radio at this time, which essentially involved pulling together sounds to create audio pictures. Now he had a chance to pitch a sound collage designed for aliens. He conferred with his colleague, CBC radio producer Max Allen, and they began to draw up a plan.

  It seemed logical to Jon and Max that they should order the sounds in a broadly evolutionary sequence, reflecting the evolution of life on Earth. Jon suggested starting with natural sounds, then sounds of non-human life, then human life, then sounds of human society and the urban environment. They could, he wrote in a letter to Carl, decide to arrange sounds by frequency or tone, grouping similar sets of sounds together. He reasoned too that certain sounds – such as that of weather systems or of water flowing over rocks – wouldn’t necessarily be as foreign to an alien as sounds of human speech. Jon wrote out his completed montage plan1 and submitted it to Carl in early April.

  In early May 1977, Ann and Tim visited Linda and Carl at their house in Ithaca. It was a bright spring day, and the group gathered around the dining table and began to brainstorm, writing down sounds that might suit an audio essay of life on Earth. Wendy Gradison was there too, a recent college graduate who had followed a Williams College boyfriend to Cornell and by this point was working as Carl’s editorial assistant. She found Carl to be ‘fabulous … Attractive, pleasant, full of energy, kind, creative and dynamic.’ Wendy is a broad-smiling bundle of energy herself, warmly remembered by everyone who worked with her. She first heard about the project while sitting in her shared office with astrophysicist Dr Steven Soter,2 right across the hall from Carl’s office. There she was approached by Shirley Arden, Carl’s executive assistant.

  Wendy says: ‘It was a gift to me that I was able to be in the orbit of someone who was not mainstream, was not religious in the traditional sense – which helped me develop my confidence to believe what I believed to be true, or not, and act as I saw fit to act. To thine own self be true and all of that … I was young, impressionable and lucky.’

  Shirley is another of the forgotten heroes of the Golden Record. She was in her forties and had been working for Carl since 1974, usually based at Cornell, but also accompanying him to his temporary office at JPL. By all accounts she was efficient, unflappable and a very fast typist, who was at the centre of all Carl’s activities during some of the busiest, most successful and productive years of his life, handling travel arrangements, expenses, contracts, letters, writing and lots more besides. A Cornell Chronicle profile from September 1976 describes Shirley’s working days during the Mars Viking landings, starting at 2.30a.m. fielding calls between Carl, the lander imaging team, and correspondents from ABC or the BBC. Some 20 years previously she had worked in the UN office of Swedish diplomat Dag Hammarskjöld (who died in a plane crash in 1961), before taking a break to become a full-time mum, returning to work after her son Erik started college. She first applied for the job with Carl because her daughter Jenny had read The Cosmic Connection and urged her to go for it.

  Anyway, back to the Sagans’ dining-room table and the brainstorm: birds, bees, streams, surf, wind, thunder, lightning, crowds, traffic, trains, rockets, barks, children playing … The guiding principle was that the sounds should communicate something about the story of our planet and human activity on it.

  Ann and Tim left that meeting with a notebook of ideas, and lots of work to do. Tim’s role was already moving towards the production side of things, so it was Ann who would undertake the immediate legwork of compiling sounds. The following day Ann was back at her place on West 74th Street, where she hit the phones. She called sound libraries, universities and archivists across the country, looking for the best recorded examples of each sound: ‘In this little voice I would say: “Um, hi … Um. We’re creating an interstellar message for NASA.” And people immediately thought I was out of my mind! “And we’d like to have your this or that for an interstellar…” People would hang up!’

  She reeled off the same story again and again: ‘Yes, NASA is making a record. Yes, NASA is sending the record into space. No, this isn’t a hoax. No, I’m not selling anything.’ She was met with positivity, enthusiasm and help, diluted by some push-back. Many of the sound libraries opted out through simple confusion, others through mistrust of any government-sponsored project. To be fair, it was a strange request. Even today, if you tell a person about the Voyager record – someone who’s not heard of it before – it excites head-scratching, furrowed brows and scepticism. People think you’re making it up or that you’ve misunderstood something. So imagine what it must have been like in 1977.

  Cash was a problem too. With hindsight we can marvel at this short-sighted attitude – sound libraries missing out on a shot at immortality just because of a few dollars and cents. Nevertheless these were commercial businesses and, unsurprisingly, many didn’t care what the project was about, they just wanted to be paid. Not only that, they wanted to be really rather well paid. But as this was being done on a relative shoestring, Ann couldn’t really offer them much more than the cost of the tapes that the sounds would be provided on, and the cost of shipping. However, she received lots of very enthusiastic responses. Mickey Kapp – then-president of Warner Special Products – put the entire Elektra Sound Archives at Ann’s disposal; Dr Roger Payne of Rockefeller University was delighted to help with her request for whale song; and Alan Botto of Princeton would end up supplying the sounds of a freight train and of a rocket launch – in fact a recording of the Saturn V lift-off from inside mission control.

  Yet there was some hostility too. Ann writes in Murmurs about one particular individual she called on in person because she had heard he could boast an unrivalled collection of recordings of children’s street cries. He threw her out of his office, saying NASA had some nerve sending a ‘little girl’ to talk to a ‘big soundman’ like him.

  One of my great enthusiasms for the Golden Record is the way it seems to have a mischievous personality of its own. It bites you when you’re not looking – like a cat that’s suddenly decided it’s had enough of this ‘petting’ business – for the discs managed to leave us with a fuller, more warts-and-all picture of humanity than even the Golden Record team intended. The discs contain secrets, errors, odd patches of darkness. And what I particularly love about our ‘big soundman’, who in my mind wears a white singlet and chews a cigar, is that his idiotic misogyny will last for a billion years. All right, his echoes aren’t on the actual physical record – the aliens won’t know about him – but as long as we are around to discuss the history of the making of the record, he will be remembered. For the rest of human history he will be an unhelpful asshat. An amazing thought.

  Ann wasn’t deterred. She was after the definitive examples of each sound. She wanted the froggiest frogs, the doggiest dogs, the perfect kiss, the angriest hyenas, the most destructive-sounding earthquakes, proper full-blooded chimps, more dogs (they wanted wild and tame ones, you see), sheep, Morse code, hammering blacksmiths…

  That all might sound pretty straightforward on the surface, but Ann was working without a computer. She had a phone, a pen and a notebook; there wasn’t any Google or YouTube to browse videos or sound files. Besides, if you’ve ever tried to track down the definitive anythi
ng, you’ll know it can prove surprisingly hard. If you’ve ever done any picture research for a magazine, blog, website, profile or whatever, you’ll know how it feels. You have an image in mind, an image you feel you’ve seen a million times in a million places, and then when you come to actually pick one that fits the bill, you just can’t find it. Before you know it, you’re using something that’s not quite right. And while I’ve never compiled a sound essay, I assume the same problems arise. ‘Yes, yes. That’s a very nice sounding frog. Have you got anything a little more … froggy?’

  ***

  Robert Brown wrote to Carl on Monday. He had heard from Carl the previous Thursday (5 May 1977 – the same day Ann, Tim and Wendy visited his house in Ithaca), when Carl had told him the good news that the record’s capacity was to be extended. So in his 9 May letter, Robert includes suggestions for 38 minutes of music, mainly picked from commercially available recordings, and emanating from both Western and non-Western traditions.3 He attempts to include music that is simple, and pieces that are complex. He chooses music that captures various pitches, types and timbres of the human voice, and music with a wide variety of meter, tempo and rhythm, and scale and harmonies. He also attempts to choose music from a range of time periods, to trace a kind of shorthand evolution of human music – partially mirroring Lomax’s ideas.

  In this proposed playlist, he has seven pieces, each with an LP catalogue number and a detailed explanation about why he feels it would be a valuable addition. His first pick is ‘Indian Vocal Music’ by Kesarbai Kerkar (catalogue number: HMV EALP 1278). It’s three minutes and 25 seconds long, he tells Carl, is a solo voice, with a seven-tone modal melody with auxiliary pitches. He notes that it has a cyclic meter of 14 beats, alongside drone, ‘ornamentation’ and drum accompaniment and some improvisation. He also gives a partial translation to the words of the music: ‘Where are you going? Don’t go alone…’

  Each suggestion comes with similar explanations about the musical form it represents. There’s a Javanese gamelan, which was his particular area of expertise, some Debussy (varieties of instruments, contrasts of dynamics, complex harmonies) and John Coltrane’s Giant Steps. Brown then lists a host of other types and tracks that he would include if they could: a lively mridangam solo in a tala of five beats, a West African dance piece, an unnamed example of ‘electronic music’.

  The letter shows the kinds of conversations Carl was having, and the approach and ambition of one of his key advisers. It shows the pair had discussed individual potential tracks beforehand. Specifically Brown describes how a trip to record shops in Portland had failed to produce Carl’s ‘Chavez piece’. Most of all, Brown’s letter shows a man who is clearly excited. It ends with a rather sweet paragraph in which he thanks Sagan for what he is doing. He talks about how it has inspired him to look again at his own work, how pleased he is that someone is doing something that pulls together astronomy and music, something he had explored in a paper a year before, but had not detected any enthusiasm for. He talks about how working on the project – however it turns out – has given him a jolt of energy, has swept away some of his ‘mental debris’, and helped him focus on his life’s work.

  ***

  The Voyager record was being designed for two audiences – human and alien – and, as it was so unlikely to ever be found by aliens, it was much more akin to one of those time capsules (like the one Carl witnessed being buried at the 1939 New York World’s Fair) than a message in a bottle. That’s as maybe. For Jon Lomberg, who pitched up at Cornell in early May, it was all about the aliens. He had already been involved remotely, as we know, but now he was in town, sleeves rolled up, rubbing his hands together, ready to get stuck in.

  Within their six-week schedule, they had to allow time for NASA to see and approve the contents ahead of final mastering and production. That gave them more like four weeks to make all the selections, figure out all the technical problems, clear copyrights and permissions and other legal whatsits, before showing NASA what they had. And all along, the entire team – from Carl and Frank on down – were toiling under the constant threat that NASA might simply say no at the final review stage.

  When Jon arrived at Cornell they didn’t have a single image selected. They had plenty of ideas, themes and subjects, and he had plenty more of his own, but not one image was on the table. Jon would be working most closely with Frank.

  Jon says: ‘I describe Frank as a kind of cross between Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison in the sense that he’s theoretically brilliant but he’s also very much a man of his hands who likes to build things. He’s a craftsman, he cuts and polishes gemstones and … a remarkable man. Carl was the figurehead – and he was the leader of it, and he plotted the grand strategy – but in terms of the technical brilliance, it was all Frank.’

  The number of images they could fit on the record was increasing. When Carl first talked to Jon they thought maybe 12. By early May, it appeared they’d have room for a lot more – in the region of 100. This depended on how many colour images they chose to send. Although the exact timings of sound-converted images were not yet certain, they knew that black-and-white pictures would take up about a third of the space of their colour counterparts.

  From the Voyager brainstorm, certain ideas had taken hold. The first is the most obvious: they wanted to communicate as much information as possible about Earth. They also decided to sidestep politics and religion. Avoiding images with overtly religious meaning might have been a harder step to take in today’s climate, but operating without constant NASA oversight meant such a decision could be made quietly. It’s logical too if we examine it from the perspective of an alien audience: any image showing religious iconography, or some religious figure or structure, is unlikely to carry much weight in terms of its interpretation by an alien being; instead, any mysterious iconography would add another needless layer for an outside observer to interpret. Plus, if they had chosen to show a mosque, for example, they would have then felt obligated to also include a cathedral, a synagogue and so on. (Indeed, much later a woman in Italy chided Jon while he was there on holiday for not including a picture of the Virgin Mary. He tried to explain that if they had showed a symbol from one religion, they would have had to show symbols from all.) And these would have only been included to satisfy an Earth-based audience, rather than an alien one.

  Jon says: ‘I think that Carl – and perhaps some of the others, although I can’t say for sure – was more aware that this project would have potential importance back on Earth. So I think he was more concerned with the human audience. And that meant making sure the message was global in feel – it wasn’t coming from Americans, or from developed Westerners, it was coming from the whole world – and that we didn’t bias it by putting in our religion and our philosophy. Of course, for the aliens that wouldn’t make any difference, but for people on Earth that would give them a much greater sense of inclusion, which is what he wanted to achieve.

  ‘I was much more interested in the extraterrestrial audience. I really wasn’t thinking of the human audience very much at all. I would say the ratio was maybe 95 per cent to 5 per cent in terms of my attention.’

  There was no room for pictures of mass protests or influential leaders either. And they didn’t want to show any image that might seem threatening or hostile. So, for instance, a picture of a nuclear explosion – which would communicate something of our technological expertise – was ruled out as it might be seen to be a threat.

  Most importantly of all, they had to try to choose images that could be correctly interpreted. Remember the old Pioneer plaques? Back then they had thought of having the human figures holding hands until they realised that an alien being could interpret the two figures as a single organism. That kind of consideration was there throughout the image hunt. Explaining this to the local press around launch time, Frank used the example of jewellery: how to a human audience the use of jewellery is obvious, but how another civilisation might assume it to be part of the hu
man anatomy or some kind of identifying mark.

  Tim and Ann, meanwhile, travelled to Washington DC for a few days. During the day they visited the National Geographic Society’s sound collection and the Library of Congress. In the evenings they took part in a series of late-night debates with whoever from the record team was in town.

  There was little that was controversial in the excerpts being mulled over for the sound essay: birdsong, engine noises, waves, animals, wind. Then at the Library of Congress a sound engineer arrived with a shopping cart full of records in various sizes, speeds and formats. He said they couldn’t touch the records, they had to point and request. One sound that briefly came under consideration was a very early field recording of battle taken from the First World War. In it an American soldier could be heard ordering the firing of a mustard-gas grenade launcher. It was, by all accounts, a chilling sound that sent Ann and Tim into a bit of a spin. Just what kind of Earth did they want to represent? They didn’t want to airbrush out all our darker instincts, and yet at the same time, how real should this sound essay be?

  The subject was debated that night at dinner with Linda, Carl and Murry Sidlin. While no solid conclusions were made then and there, the general consensus was that the sound essay should be a ‘best of’ rather than a ‘worst of’. Soon afterwards, the policy was decided: a space-bound soundscape was not the place for apologetic soul-searching. With the best will in the world, how would it mean anything to an alien? Besides, it’s not in our nature. How many of those irritating festive round-robin letters do you receive from your wider family? And how many of those letters note addiction, failures, adultery or debt? Hardly bloody any. Instead it’s all promotions, prizes, deals and achievements.