The Vinyl Frontier

by Jonathan Scott

  Now we come to March 1977, where we find Jon working as a freelance radio producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.11 At the time he was recording Carl reading excerpts from his latest book, The Dragons of Eden, which had just won the Pulitzer, and Jon had recently installed a housewarming gift of a large 3D Plexiglas galaxy in the living room of Carl’s new home on Tyler Road, Ithaca.

  Jon writes: ‘Dotted through the blue stars of the galactic disk were a few bright magenta dots marking the home stars of advanced civilisations. Small panels bore writing in glowing characters, “legends” that described the location, biology, and culture of these imaginary societies … By the light of the galaxy in Carl’s living room, he told me about the Voyager Record project.’

  Let’s imagine Carl looking up, with a faraway look on his face, as he says: ‘We think we may also be able to send some images. Between the sounds and the pictures, we can describe something of life on our planet and human emotion. I am assembling a small team to make this record. You could be of great help. Are you interested?’

  ***

  The Voyager interstellar message team was now complete: Carl Sagan and Frank Drake, supported by Ann Druyan, Tim Ferris, Jon Lomberg and Linda Salzman Sagan. Throughout February and March the project plan began to expand on the 14-point primer penned by Frank in Honolulu. The record was still designed to spin at 33⅓rpm, but by now they had decided that it could be double-sided. Now, rather than running images and sounds together on a single-sided disc, the music would be on one side, the images on the other12 (along with other non-musical information). So while total runtime had doubled from Honolulu, one side of music still only gave them around 27 minutes to play with. And, as Carl noted in Murmurs of Earth, that’s barely enough for a couple of movements of the average symphony.

  Carl contacted musicologists and academics. Contributors at this stage included Robert E. Brown (executive director for the Centre for World Music in Berkeley), ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax and a friend of Carl’s named Murry Sidlin (at the time conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington). All three would exert an influence over the direction of the project.

  Sidlin was born in Baltimore in 1940 and had studied music at the Peabody Institute, graduating in 1968. His opinion was that they had to include complete pieces – no excerpts, highlights or fragments. One Sidlin suggestion was that they include Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, followed by No. 1: Prelude and Fugue in C from Book 2 of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. Carl writes in Murmurs how Sidlin felt the contrast in mood between these two pieces would be ‘striking’, and indeed that transition, exactly as suggested, would be adopted come the final mastering of the mixtape.

  Lomax is credited with helping spark the global folk and blues revivals of the 1950s and ’60s.13 He started his career by literally following in the footsteps of his father, John, a folklorist who in the early 1930s began a decade-long series of road trips, making field recordings for the Archive of American Folk Song of the Library of Congress. The whole Lomax family assisted in this endeavour, including 18-year-old Alan who in 1933 accompanied his father on the first of many field trips and became the project’s first paid assistant.

  When funding for the Library of Congress recordings ceased, Alan went freelance, travelling America, Europe and the world, making thousands of recordings, reams of notes and hours of oral histories, preserving music from ethnic groups, fading dialects that would otherwise have completely disappeared from the historical record, and documenting obscure forms of music. All this sat alongside his recordings of celebrated folk, jazz and blues performers such as Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly and Jelly Roll Morton.

  With the FBI investigating supposed communist leanings, Lomax moved to Europe. Then he returned to New York in triumphant fashion, organising the Folksong ’59 show at Carnegie Hall. This featured bluesmen like Muddy Waters and Memphis Slim, alongside bluegrass acts and folk revivalists such as Pete Seeger. The audience went wild and the resulting LP (Folksong Festival at Carnegie Hall) would influence a new generation of musicians.

  In the spring of 1977, when the Voyager team came knocking, Alan had been completely immersed in music from all over the globe for his entire working life and had only just returned from another extensive trip overseas. He quickly drew up a list of music he felt should be included. Some were his own recordings, others were commercially available. Throughout he would campaign vigorously for ethnic or world music at the expense of Western classical pieces. He also wanted them to choose pieces that best illustrated his theories.

  During his long career, Lomax had come up with a complex series of classifications for different types of vocal music, which together he called cantometrics.14 He believed these measurable forms were found within all types of folk music and could be shown to correlate with certain societal developments. For instance, a certain type of rhythm when combined with a certain type of harmony might indicate a sedentary agricultural community. That’s a hugely simplified description, but that’s the basic idea.

  Lomax was as enthused as anyone about the record. And he felt if they picked the right pieces of music – tracks that fitted into and illustrated these evolutionary theories of musical development – it would be possible to paint a complete picture of human history, of human progress, in the Voyager mixtape. He later felt that Sagan was rather dismissive of his theories.15 Reading between the lines, I think Lomax may have been too keen, almost too much of an expert. He was someone who could be quick to perceive criticism from others. And it’s possible to see how someone could, rightly or wrongly, interpret Sagan’s tone as snooty. Sagan admits in Murmurs that they simply didn’t have the time or space to listen to and incorporate all of Lomax’s ideas on cantometrics into the record.

  What is not in doubt is that Lomax would suggest several of the most memorable tunes on the Golden Record, on one occasion literally flinging a disc across the room in his enthusiasm. His influence on the project has been overstated at times, while at others it has been unfairly overlooked. In any event, both he and Robert Brown gave significant time, thought and energy to Voyager. And while Alan’s relationship with the Voyager record was destined to sour over time, Robert’s refusal to give ground on one particular subject would lead to a most goosebump-raising three minutes of gold.

  While Jon Lomberg had already been earmarked for Frank’s picture team, he too had opinions on what music should be in the running. He writes that when he suggested Mozart during a conversation with Carl, he was shocked at the astronomer’s response.

  ‘It’s kind of lightweight, isn’t it?’ said Carl.

  ‘Lightweight?’ gasped Jon. ‘What are you talking about? You just have to include Mozart.’

  Writing about it later, Jon put Carl’s reluctance down to him being a child of the post-war era, when the ‘big gooey’ piano concertos of Rachmaninoff and the like were most popular. Indeed, Carl’s favourite piece of music of all time, he once informed Jon, was the Russian Easter Festival Overture by Rimsky-Korsakov. As far as Jon was concerned, they’d be absolutely crucified if Mozart wasn’t on the record. Carl still looked doubtful.

  ‘Do you really think so? Well, why don’t you put some suggestions on tape, and we’ll listen to it.’

  Back in Toronto Jon made a tape. Knowing any lengthy piece would immediately be met with stiff opposition, he put forward three ‘brief but perfect jewels’. These were ‘Voi Che Sapete’ from Figaro, the ‘Alleluia’ from the ‘Exsultate, Jubilate, K.165’, and the ‘Queen of the Night’ aria from the second act of The Magic Flute, whose high F is the highest note sung in all opera. Jon sent the cassette to Carl ‘with a little prayer’.

  By their next meeting Carl was convinced and had ‘Queen of the Night’ earmarked for eternity. He approved of the elegant economy of representing, in less than three minutes of runtime, 1) Mozart, 2) the range of a human soprano, and 3) the category of opera.

  ‘We’ll send “Queen of the Night”,’ he told Jon.

/>   Mozart was aboard.

  ***

  This variety of music pouring in was all very well, but the record was still painfully short. They would soon have suggestions enough to fill 10 records to the brim with good music, and yet only one side of a single LP to play with. It was so unsatisfying. With so little space, how could they please anyone? Put yourself in their shoes. Give yourself just 27 minutes to show off your own collection and see how far you get.

  There were lots of fairly lengthy classical pieces in the mix too, all jostling for position. Carl was in team Debussy, Tim had the back of Bach’s ‘Passacaglia and Fugue’, while Lomax was pushing a Sicilian folk song. Tim, like Murry Sidlin, was dead against using any excerpts or samples – there was to be no fading in or out on this record, thank you very much; complete pieces or nothing – and the ‘Passacaglia and Fugue’ was just too long.

  They began to talk about ways they might increase the records’ capacity. Sagan writes about how he and Tim discussed various ideas. They pondered making it a double album – sending two pairs of records bonded together, making four sides in total, which could double the playing time for pictures and music – but NASA was working out all its calculations on the assumption of the weight of one single record mounted on the side. Sagan knew that if he went back to NASA and asked to move the goalposts, it was bound to cause trouble, and probably get a big fat no.

  Frank explains: ‘They had allowed a certain amount of weight for the record … In a nutshell, on the spacecraft there are little rockets that are fired to orient it, and to change its speed slightly. And those rockets, their thrust vectors have to go through the centre of gravity of the spacecraft. And any time you change any object on the spacecraft the position of the centre of gravity changes and you have to re-orient all these things. NASA was at the point where they didn’t want to change anything – add any weight or move things around – because they’d have to re-do the whole thing, and if you get it wrong the mission fails because when you fire the rockets, the spacecraft, instead of doing what it’s supposed to, spins. It’s bad, bad news. So NASA was very nervous about all this and wanted to make sure we didn’t do anything which would require us to change the weight of the record.’

  So they talked over narrowing the grooves, pushing them closer together, but this might leave the disc unplayable, and anyway would result in quite a heavy loss of sound quality.

  Sound quality? ‘Hang on,’ thought Tim. ‘What about talking books?’

  Record players made today normally come with the 33⅓rpm or 45rpm speed options. Older machines – indeed many of those manufactured during the 1960s and ’70s – still came with the 78rpm speed for playing shellac discs, and many also came with a 16rpm option.

  At 16rpm (or, more accurately, 16⅔rpm) records span too slowly for proper high fidelity. However, the slower speed massively increased the record’s capacity, making this a natural format for longer, spoken-word albums. In reality, the 16s never dominated record sales in the way that 33s, 45s and 78s had before them, but the 16rpm format was used for talking books for the blind. Radio stations also sometimes used 16rpm discs to make pre-recorded broadcasts, and there were all sorts of curios – such as the legendary Seeburg 1000 record player, designed to play 9-inch 16rpm discs for background muzak in public spaces, where sound quality wasn’t paramount. However, with the onset of the more compact cassette from the 1960s – ideal for talking books and longer, spoken-word albums – the 16rpm format was doomed.

  Tim says: ‘We were starting to pull things together. And it seemed clear to me that we weren’t going to be able to say very much in such a short amount of music. And I just thought of it one evening; it wasn’t a big discovery or anything, I just thought: “Oh hell, we can do the talking book thing.” I looked up the stats and the roll-off wasn’t that bad, we weren’t going to get big high-fidelity issues or anything. Compression wasn’t a problem. It just seemed like an obvious solution, so we did it without any hesitation.’16

  Earth had 90 minutes.

  Notes

  1 At the time, Nora was dating Carl Bernstein, one half of the reporting team that broke Watergate.

  2 I asked Tim for a more detailed description of his set-up. ‘My stereo evolved from an Arvin radio purchased in 1958 … as I recall it then consisted of two Magnepan speakers of three panels each (back then called Magneplanar) standing around five feet tall by six or seven feet wide – they looked like electrostats but actually were dynamic ribbon speakers connected by pure-copper lamp cable (still my preferred method) to a pair of 400-watt Dynaco power amps, an Apt Holman preamp, and an AR turntable employing a lovely Shure phono cartridge. The components other than speakers were housed in a wall-sized set of shelves that I built myself, which also held some 5,000–10,000 LPs.’

  3 In an interview with one of the record team back in 2007, I was given an estimated total cost of the final project coming in at around $18,000.

  4 Or, to put it another way, Frank Drake had in Carl Sagan the perfect figurehead to absorb all the political flak while he got on with the important business of sending messages to the stars.

  5 On the telephone to me in the spring of 2018.

  6 You may be wondering: ‘How?! How do you put photographs on a record? It’s a record!’ It’s a good question, and in due course there will be more detail about how they actually managed it. For now, the important point is that they already knew the theory of how it could be done – a still photograph could be ‘filmed’ using a video camera, then the resulting video signals could be converted into sound, then that sound could be put on the record. Capeesh?

  7 You can see both these examples from the Ideas Riding file via the Library of Congress website: www.loc.gov/item/cosmos000093/.

  8 In the introduction for that interview he described Intelligent Life as ‘one of the most exciting nontechnical science books ever written’.

  9 Before interviewing Jon in 2017, he was kind enough to share with me an unpublished manuscript in which he described his work with Carl, and his work on the Voyager Golden Record. Henceforth if you read ‘Jon says’, it’s from an interview, and ‘Jon writes’ is from the manuscript.

  10 Carl liked to refer to the hurtling moons of ‘Barsoom’ – the Martian name for their homeworld in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s ‘Jon Carter’ stories. The books thrilled Carl as a boy, and helped inspire his interest in Mars.

  11 He had worked there since 1973, as a writer/producer of radio documentaries for CBC series Ideas, covering space science, psychology and meteorology.

  12 To this layman at least, this seems quite a good idea. Do you remember the sound old dial-up modems used to make? Or the sound cassettes made when uploading games to your old Atari? Now imagine you’re an alien. You’ve finally figured out how to play the record, you’ve sat down with your mates in some alien lab, you’ve listened to some Beethoven, then a clunking, high-pitched, metallic, gibberish sound comes from this ancient alien artefact. You might not think: ‘Oh, don’t worry, it’s just an image.’ But you might think: ‘Well, this is a little too avant-garde for me. Skip it!’

  13 Alongside Harry Smith’s 1952 six-LP Anthology of American Folk Music.

  14 In cantometrics Lomax developed thirty-seven ‘style factors’ to categorise forms of folk music – these were produced in consultation with various specialists in linguistics and other studies. So in terms of vocal performance, for example, he would grade a particular ‘style factor’ (such as level of cohesion in group singing, or length of phrasing) on a five-point scale.

  15 See eamusic.dartmouth.edu/~larry/published_articles/voyager_.pdf.

  16 Tim charts the specific outcome of cutting the record at 16⅔rpm in Murmurs. He also observes that an alien listener might note that some music on the record is in stereo, while other tracks are mono. This might lead the listener to interpret that some of the music made on Earth was composed by a creature with only one ear.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Uranium Clockr />
  ‘It was an absurd task right from the start. Describe Earth and Humanity in 100 pictures. Do it in a few weeks.’

  Jon Lomberg

  The biggest obstacle was time. The completed artefact had to be delivered no later than 1 June and there were suddenly an awful lot of moving parts. The expanded plan for the golden record now included images, music, a sound essay and some kind of spoken greeting. But with a little over six weeks until their unmissable deadline, Carl needed to delegate.

  By late April the various teams and sub-teams had taken shape. Frank took on all technical aspects of the project, recruiting physicists Valentin Boriakoff and George Helou to help. Cornell’s astronomy department provided further back-up in the form of engineer Dan Mitler, staff photographer Hermann ‘Eck’ Eckelmann and NAIC draftsman Barbara Boettcher. The project would generate a huge amount of tedious legwork too, in terms of copyright clearances, letters, phone calls and all the other bits of legal admin, much of which would be shouldered by Amahl Shakhashiri (Frank’s assistant at the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center), Wendy Gradison (Carl’s editorial assistant at ICARUS, the International Journal of Solar System Studies, which he edited) and Shirley Arden (Carl’s executive assistant).

  Tim and Ann worked mainly from New York, while Carl, Frank and Linda generally stuck to Ithaca. Jon Lomberg commuted between Toronto and Ithaca, staying on Cornell campus during the final push. Jon writes: ‘It could have taken years, but we didn’t have years … And I don’t know if we could have done it any better, if we had years to do it.’