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Dropping into the city library, I spotted a book I’d heard about in advance of its release but not quite noticed in bookstores afterwards. Having a chance to sign out Jonathan Scott’s The Vinyl Frontier: The Story of the Voyager Golden Record and read it that way was welcome.
I did notice the book made frequent references to Murmurs of Earth, a book by Carl Sagan and his fellow team members who’d assembled the Voyager record on short notice before launch (and which I’d managed to find a used copy of a while ago), and also to the documentary “The Farthest: Voyager in Space” (which I watched when it premiered on PBS, and then again when it showed up on Netflix in higher definition than my cable). Scott takes a slightly wry and somehow identifiably British perspective on the subject, though. One thing I did notice about the book, however, is that while Scott has worked in music journalism, he kept his comments on the record’s musical selections limited, with a self-deprecating “my thoughts can’t live up to the weightiness of selecting music to outlast the species.” (So far as that goes, I can contemplate how some of the pictures encoded as audio signals, the recent Earthside decoding of which was also mentioned in the book, preserve a “turbo train” taken out of service not that long after launch and an old terminal at Toronto International Airport now demolished; the book did point out some “Canadian content” was involved in the record’s production, which I hadn’t known before.) I did manage a while ago to hear the Voyager music myself, and out of the music outside my cultural background (and my half-articulate expressing of it) I was perhaps most taken with the Javanese gamelan orchestra, and as much as everyone brings up “Johnny B. Goode” the mariachi piece just before it was also attention-getting.
I did notice the book made frequent references to Murmurs of Earth, a book by Carl Sagan and his fellow team members who’d assembled the Voyager record on short notice before launch (and which I’d managed to find a used copy of a while ago), and also to the documentary “The Farthest: Voyager in Space” (which I watched when it premiered on PBS, and then again when it showed up on Netflix in higher definition than my cable). Scott takes a slightly wry and somehow identifiably British perspective on the subject, though. One thing I did notice about the book, however, is that while Scott has worked in music journalism, he kept his comments on the record’s musical selections limited, with a self-deprecating “my thoughts can’t live up to the weightiness of selecting music to outlast the species.” (So far as that goes, I can contemplate how some of the pictures encoded as audio signals, the recent Earthside decoding of which was also mentioned in the book, preserve a “turbo train” taken out of service not that long after launch and an old terminal at Toronto International Airport now demolished; the book did point out some “Canadian content” was involved in the record’s production, which I hadn’t known before.) I did manage a while ago to hear the Voyager music myself, and out of the music outside my cultural background (and my half-articulate expressing of it) I was perhaps most taken with the Javanese gamelan orchestra, and as much as everyone brings up “Johnny B. Goode” the mariachi piece just before it was also attention-getting.